Quilter51 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 18, 2019 9:55 am
And today the man is talking about 100 percent tarrifs on red wine which will simply increase the war in another direction. Funny but I always though capitalism was about letting the market do its job.
He's been talking about that for a while ... is that in retaliation for French tariffs, or is this something else? BTW, interesting story in the LA Times today about the tariff's effects on a Cali winery owner exports to China.
As for a recession: This brings to mind an old joke about economic predictions: If you laid all the world's economists end to end, they'd still point in different directions.
Will we see a recession in the near future? Maybe not, but it's possible ... at one time the U.S. could swing a big economic stick and the world would fall in line. But it's not 1946, folks ...
Globialization isn't going away. We may not like how China plays the game, but the U.S. needs the huge market it represents. If tariffs make our goods too expensive, well, there are other countries to buy from. (Russia and Brazil pop up in the stories about agricultural tariff issues. And the European Commission reports that the EU is China's biggest trading partner. How that changes with a Brexit remains to be seen.)
Does it hurt China on exports? To a point, but again, the U.S. isn't the only trading partner out there.
On the whole, things look rosy here. (And yep, people are certainly spending $$$.) But the 3.7% unemployment rate doesn't necessarily reflect that many jobs are temp, or gig, or contract or part-time, or near minimum-wage. (As you've mentioned, Barb, and we know about that in my house, too.) This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 4 million people are classified as involuntary part-time workers.
Those figures also show that some 1.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force (wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months). Of these, 368,000 are discouraged workers who have given up because they believe no jobs are available for them. (How many of those have retired/filed for disability/are over age 50, I wonder? )
This is my long-winded way of saying that we well could pay a high cost for our current policies. That's going to run headlong into our current economic pressures (and we haven't seen the full shift into technology). It's going to be a bumpy ride ... but how bumpy depends on what happens in the next few years.
I suggest we all keep doing what we've been doing. Stay vilgilant, keep spending under control, stay out of debt and arrange your investments to withstand a drop.