No Really: Stop Saying Vibecession
Is America still having a “Vibecession”? Depends on who you ask.
“America Is Still Having a ‘Vibecession,’” intoned the New York Times’s own Paul Krugman on May 24, 2024.
“If Donald Trump wins the election, the main reason will surely be that a majority of voters believe that America’s economy is in bad shape,” fumed Krugman. “And no matter how much you may dread a second Trump administration, electoral defeat for an incumbent who is seen as presiding over a bad economy is, at least in one sense, politics as usual.”
“By normal measures, however, the U.S. economy isn’t in bad shape,” Krugman asserted confidently. “In fact, it’s doing quite well, better than almost all its global peers.”
Krugman may be right in a sense.
For elites and comfortably Middle-Class earners, 2024’s economic challenges are mild to middling.
“Only half of Americans, maybe a bit more, own stock,” a Moody Analytics Chief Economist told CNN Newsroom hosts two weeks ago. “And it’s probably only a third of Americans that own enough stock to really make a difference. Two-thirds of Americans own their own home. So, they’re benefiting from the run-up in house prices.”
“But a third of Americans rent, and that means that, for many of them, they’ll be locked out of…