Recession Is Coming! Should We Blame Biden or Trump

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All right, everybody. We’re going to talk about the R word recession in search of recession. Again, happy Easter, everyone. Christ is risen. I got to talk a little bit about recession because I see one coming. I think we probably had one or we definitely had one during the Biden years. They just never really called it. We had two quarters of negative.

economic growth. How and why? know Kevin Hassett said there’s not going to be recession 100 % not going to happen in 2025. Okay. We’re getting to a point in time where I said the businesses out there are like, I’m not going to do it. You’re going to invest? I’m not going to invest. I don’t know what the rules are. You know what the rules are? The old life cereal commercial back from the 1970s with Mikey. I’m not going to try it.

He’ll try, he try it, he’ll try anything, you know, whatever. Businesses are not gonna do much when they don’t know what’s up sideways, backwards, or forwards. And this type of stop leads to what? Not as much economic growth. And the technical definition of a recession is two quarters of negative economic growth. Let’s go over it, okay?

This, again, completely self-inflicted. Recessions are actually called by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It’s a group out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they, again, they define the recession as significant decline, economic activity spread across the economy lasting more than a few months that is visible in measures such as GDP, employment, incomes, and industrial.

Okay. So, the debate that’s taking place right now is that Donald Trump feels that in order to stave off a recession, the economy is slowing. He’s talked about his, you know, basic preemptive cuts you mentioned today. That lower interest rates, Fed lowers interest rates, that’s magically going to stave it off. And just because rates come down, short-term rates come down, that means, okay, the party is on.

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Party’s on again, party on, Wade, party on, Garth. No, no, no, no. Anyway, again, I wrote a column about this back in 2008 in search of recession. And I alluded to a television program that I liked a lot back in the 70s. It was kind of like a precursor to some of the stuff you have on today. It was hosted by Leonard Nimoy. It was called In Search Of. And In Search Of, Leonard Nimoy would…

or you know, look into UFOs or the Loch Ness Monster or where or where did Amelia Earhart go? Bigfoot was another one. Again, you know, it’s kind of like the pre podcast winner Nimoy ahead of his time 1970 show in search of so we’re going to play the game of in search of recession. Okay, they’re they’re rare, they’re hard to find. We

Again, we have a very resilient economy, whether it be via technology, productivity, business efficiency, companies, manufacturers, you name it. They can foresee problems. They see them coming down the road. They understand how supply chains work. And that’s obviously a problem today. They are going to work, look for workarounds. OK, and that’s that’s what they’re doing right now.

Supply chain management all sorts of things and again It’s it’s not gonna happen overnight and many businesses are gonna get hit harder than others and again this goes with much of my frustration that you’ve been listening to over the past few weeks Is the fact that it’s gonna be much much harder for small businesses out there harder not impossible, but much more difficult now

What I try to tell people do during a recession, first and foremost, believe it or not, stock markets end up outperforming during a recession, because it’s anticipating coming out of the recession. It’s the lead in which is the issue. Now, again, you can’t let recessions change your philosophy in regards to your portfolio and getting bent out of shape over it. You just…

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can’t do it. Again, media loves them. Lots of talk about lots of people discuss whether or we’re going to have one or not. It happens all the time. What I, what I try to tell people to do, you know, we’ve, we’ve talked about this here on the show when confronted by the recession monster, it shows up. First and foremost, again, you know, I know that

Difficult to swallow but every single time you have a market sell-off or correction. It’s always an opportunity time and time again Again, we talk about this when it comes to our process You have to have you have to have patience and you have to have courage When things are getting hairy do not try to predict market tops and bottoms Warren Buffett

It’s not capable of doing it. We’re not capable of doing it. It just doesn’t work. Over time, markets will do extraordinary, even bizarre things. Again, could talk about sucking it up during a recession. Markets, whatever it may be. But one of the things you’ve got to also take a look at when it comes to recessions, how I like to describe them. Oftentimes, you want to use it as an opportunity for your business, your household.

in regards to cleaning things up. Cleaning things up. Where can I create greater efficiencies? This goes back to our concept that we preach all the time about being anti-fragile. Where you’re gonna deal with the shock, you’re gonna absorb the shock, you’re not gonna, shock’s not gonna break you, you’re not fragile, you’re not gonna just be resilient, but you’re gonna come out on the other side of the shock stronger than you were going.

in. Again, the way things are, the terrain as it sets right now, what is taking place, the White House, how they’re handling things, absolutely. Absolutely, I see a recession in the cards and no, it’s not something that Jay Powell can stave off. Again, it’s an uncertainty recession. It’s a self-induced uncertainty recession. And yet you might actually even think about, give me another

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kind of explain this, I wrote many pieces post great recession and how it was handled by Obama and how that was one of that was the weakest post recession recovery we’d ever seen. And the reason being was uncertainty, all sorts of rules and regulations and everything that Obama was throwing at the economy at that point in time, trying to rejigger everything out of Washington, DC. And it didn’t help.

didn’t help. This is why you had muted growth. If you remember back in the time at the time, they were true believers. You had Obama and Biden what they were doing. Every Biden coming out there, it’s recovery summer. And it was this recovery, this and recovery that and they really believed it until they didn’t anymore. And they just said, Hey, you know what, this country is not going to go back to the type of growth that we had seen in the past that was just unsustainable. They thought they could do it. They can’t. Again,

We’ve got to clear the decks when it comes to regulation. We’ve got to clear the decks when it comes to all this. It’s certainly when it comes to tariffs. That is the only way through. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.