The stock market is tanking due to oh-so-many-factors that serious economists have been warning about and yet the media is pretending this is surprising. Some are calling this Black Monday 2024 and somewhat predictably many trading platforms are reporting “outages.”
Is this the recession “triggered”? Last Friday the jobs report showed that unemployment was up to 4.3 percent in July, bringing the three-month average to 4.13 percent. The three-month average in the same period last year was 3.63 percent, which is a strong indication of a recession if you consider the “Sahm Rule.”
The Sahm Rule is named after Obama-era economist Claudia Sahm. It states that a recession usually follows when the three-month unemployment average is more than half a point lower than the three-month average the previous year. This has been true every time this has happened since the 1970s and now those conditions are met.
Major banks are predicting interest rate cuts when the Federal Reserve meets again – by up to 1 percent per meeting, which, according to economist Peter St. Onge, “qualifies as panic in Central Banking.”
The good news is that most Americans already feel like they live in a recession. It’s the media and politicians that are pretending otherwise.
