I'm interested to see if we can get this forum back on track.
For those of you who believe we are in recession, can you be more specific about why, what definition you are using. It obviously can't be the standard textbook one.
Are you doing your own research or just believing things you read? Some people attach articles and this is great, I look at them all. But from the way I'm reading some posts, these are being presented as fact, when in many cases they are an opinion of data.
I'm in the slowdown camp as opposed to full blown recession. And by the way, I'm not saying that you can't trade it either way to make money.
Let me give some of my " facts " and I look forward to reading comments.
1. Budget deficits - for a long time now, the UK and US have run budget deficits, germany and Japan have had budget surpluses. The first 2 have been the best performing markets, why should it change now?
2. There's a credit crunch, don't you know.... Well not according to the figures releases by the fed last week which shows lending went up in every quarter in 07 and that interest rates on investment grade paper are lower now than when it all started back in July.
3. All those wise men in Davos are predicting chaos. Since when have politicians or bank ceo's been that clever? After all, if your think the bank ceo is clever enough to tell us things are tough and it may be a bumpy ride, why weren't they clever enough to prevent their own banks having such huge writedowns?
4. The massive derivatives market is going to implode.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/80f0e842-ce0c-11dc-9e4e-000077b07658.html
5. The US housing market is in turmoil
Read this
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ed56ecd0-ce79-11dc-877a-000077b07658.html
Average falls of 7% turmoil??
6. Retail sales falling. Linking this one in with 5 above, it's the one that perhaps surprises me the most. Interest rates have been rising ( until recently of course) for 2-3 years. The whole point of that is too slow down consumer spending and dampen rising house prices. It's worked! Why is anyone surprised?
7. Looking back to headlines in 2000-2003, 1997, 1998, 1990-1993, I see economists making predictions of doom and gloom, banks losing hundreds of billions of dollars for bad loans to asia, russia, commercial propoerty developers, markets that fall 20-25% in 2 month periods and general hysteria and panic. Sentiment is very gloomy and the crowd thinks bear market and recession. The crowd is usually wrong, what's different this time?
8. If america is roughly 50% of world cap, but only accounts for about 20-25% of world trade and the belief is that world trade will slow but remain firm, how can america possibly go into recession. Wouldn't it have to be the other way around? This is a genuine question, I don't understand how the 2 can't be linked and any light shed on this would be helpful.
9. Hedge funds going bust/losing a lot. To me, this is normal and simply proves that most hedge funds are lousy hedgers ( if at all) and are really more outright, leveraged speculation vehicles.
Anyway, that's it for now. Once again, if you want to answer this particular post, please please outline your thoughts and evidence. All contributions are appreciated. As I said, I think this is a slowdown as opposed to recession, but as there is so much data out there, I keen to see/hear what is making so many believe it's a recession and one line answers without any context don't really help.