New York CNN — From the executive suite to the grocery aisles to the halls of the Federal Reserve, the big question is: Can red-hot inflation be vanquished without tipping the economy into a recession?
Ironically, all this talking about a recession can actually help cause one. How people feel is a huge driver of consumer behavior and business planning. The famous British economist John Maynard Keynes coined the phrase “animal spirits” to describe what drives investors, consumers and business leaders. Fear, hope, uncertainty, and confidence are all hard to measure — and hugely important to how the economy fares.
Essentially, worrying about a recession and planning for one can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“At the end of the day, a recession is a loss of faith,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. Consumers worry about losing a job and so pull back on spending, and business leaders worry their sales will decline and start laying off workers.
“You get into this kind of self-reinforcing negative cycle,” he told CNN’s Early Start. “So when sentiment is this bad and starting to feed on itself, we run the risk of talking ourselves into one.”
The US economy grew at a 2.9% annual rate in the third quarter, and the unemployment rate is near a 50-year low. That’s not going to last. The Federal Reserve this week lowered its forecast for growth in the United States next year to just 0.5% and a jobless rate rising to 4.6% by the end of 2023.
“Look, we’re planning as if there’s going to be a mild recession next year,” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told CNN This Morning. “And a lot of people in the business world are trying to talk ourselves into one is what it sometimes feels like to me.”
But he added, “If I didn’t watch business shows or read the Wall Street Journal, the word recession wouldn’t be in my vocabulary because we just don’t see it in our data.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/economy/talking-ourselves-into-recession/index.html
