The USA is going to have a nasty nasty presidential campaign season … and the voters will be presented with either “the same as the past four years” or “everything opposite the past four years” … this kind of uncertainty will cause businesses to pull back, gather the horses and wait until the outcome of the election before committing to one direction or the other … I suspect a small recession, but recession none-the-less …
I can tell you with some degree of certainty that recession will happen in 4th Q 2019. That’s the point at which I will retire and begin living entirely on my investments.
Q4, 2019 feels right to me for some reason. We are certainly due for a major correction, and throw in the prospect of an impeachment trial and the stock market may crash leading us into some kind of a recession.
Oooh, just like the “new economy” of the dot-com bubble!
Anyway …
Like Tolstoy’s families: Recessions are all alike; every boom time booms in its own way.*
The current growth era is quite odd. Very slow growing for a surprisingly long time. So it’s hard to compare it to other up times. In particular, it makes guessing when the next down turn starts even harder. And I’ve been good lately. The dot-com bust I knew was about to happen with 3 months of when it did. The housing bubble burst within 4 or 5 months.
This one … I couldn’t being to guess when it will happen. But it is a bubble, just a well rounded one. So even a conservative “within a year” guess could be off. Definitely will not last more than 2 years.
Second time I referenced this recently. One more time and I’m an official old dude.
The whole point of economic downturns and market crashes is that they are unpredictable. Of course it’s possible to see that such and such market is overheated and is going to crash at some point, but it’s impossible to rationally predict when an irrational market is going to suddenly rationalize. If it was rational it would have already corrected.