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Anecdotally, our company's next couple quarters are projected to be a bloodbath. Spending is down everywhere, nearly all of our customers are pushing for huge cuts to their contracts, and in turn literally any costs we can jettison to keep jobs is being pushed through. We're hearing the same from our customers.

AI has been the only new investment our company has made (half hearted at that). I definitely get the sense that everyone pretending things are fine to investors, meanwhile they are playing musical chairs.

Back in my economics classes at college, a professor pointed out that a stock market can go up for two reasons: On one hand, the economy is legitimately growing and shares are becoming more valuable. But on the other hand, people and corporations could be cutting spending en masse so there's extra cash to flood the stock markets and drive up prices regardless of future earnings.


I work for one of the largest packaging companies in the world. Customers across the board in the US are cutting back on how much packaging they need due to presumably lower sales volume. Make of that information what you will.
My eBay sales have been way down this year too and so far q4 is not looking good at all. People are cutting back across the board and it’s going to be very ugly once wall street stops plugging their ears and covering their eyes.
> My eBay sales have been way down this year too and so far q4 is not looking good at all.

I had half the mind to start up an old project I abandoned after losing my job. I opened eBay and was floored to see how much costs have increased in my little niche.

This is an indicator that is very close to the sale time. If you can share and don't mind sharing, how did whatever you saw during 2020/2021 corelate with retail sales?
tariffs could be an explanation.

sometimes volume and total $ are not the same.

car manufacturers, right at the beginning of covid, started cutting orders of components from their suppliers, thinking that demand is going to drop due to covid induced recession.

Guess what happened next?

Covid was a black swan event. Unless we see something like the MBS collapse, the underlying economic weakness isn’t due to a such an acute root cause.

Not sure how comparable they are.

I know it’s not popular to bring politics into things on HN, but… From the outside at least, White House policy sounds like at least as much of a black swan event as COVID.
Not at all, people voted for this and the outcome was expected by people paying attention.

I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.

Black swan event should be unexpected. Trumps victory was within expected possibilities. It was also his second victory.

And his moves after winning were not unexpected either - he is doing what his opponents predicted he will do.

From the inside, this is nothing compared to COVID. 2025 feels a bit weird but to compare it with 2020 is laughable.
A week before the election I bought shares in Lynas, (the major rare earth producer outside of China) when it seemed Trump could win.

Rare Earth exports was a known lever that the CCP uses in a trade war, and Trump was very likely to restart his previous one.

However, the Pentagon putting money into MP Materials was quite unexpected, and people are still throwing money at them.

A contagious disease pandemic is not a black swan event. We have had many of them before and there are people whose day jobs are to model and plan for them.
These are not mutually exclusive properties. Pandemic modellers do not predict exactly when a pandemic will emerge, they predict how a pandemic will evolve once it emerges. The actual emergence of a pandemic is still about as predictable as, say, a stock market crash or a war.
It was the only such event in most people's lifetimes.
The virulence and adaptability of Covid makes it very much a black swan.
Then almost anything is not a black swan by this logic.

Russian invasion is not a black swan event, we had many of them before and there are people whose day job is to plan for them.

Tsunami, earthquake are another examples. We had them before and there are plans for such events.

Trump fired many people whose job it was to plan for it. RFK Jr canceled vaccine research and various practices that will make it worse. I never imagined such idiocy on top of Trump's more likely racism policies. Future pandemics are much more likely now.
> Covid was a black swan event

I beg to differ. Epidemiologists and public health planners always knew such a pandemic would happen eventually. In fact, it wasn't even surprising that it came from a coronavirus as this virus group was the most likely contender with the influenza family.

The only open question was when. We dodged the bullet several times over the past two decades with SRAS, H5N1, MERS and H1N1 (notice, two influenza and two coronaviruses), but one virus slipping through was definitely the most likely outcome.

And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.

Ah, so an asteroid obliterating NYC is not a black swan event because it's statistically likely to happen over long enough time horizons?

If you can forsee the event, but not predict the time, it's just as bad as an even you cannot forsee.

Sure, all probabilities go to 1 over a large enough time span. I don't think there's anything useful you can do with that information. Being early is the same as being wrong.
>> The only open question was when ... >> And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.

If you can't tell us when, your predicition is useless.

Just because you can't tell when something will happen does not make it a Black Swan event…
Tariffs can easily be turned off, and in December the supreme Court could rule that they majority of tariffs in place are illegal AND must be refunded.

According to Polymarket, there's a >50% chance that happens: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-supreme-court-rule-in-...

Polymarket gives a >50% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal, not that they would be refunded - the market only gives a ~8% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal AND and order to refund: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-court-force-trump-to-r...
Don't forget that Howard Lutnick, the Commerce secretary and tariff fanatic, has his sons betting against them at his former firm.

Trump’s Commerce Secretary Loves Tariffs. His Former Investment Bank Is Taking Bets Against Them: https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-r...

And the senate probe into said conflict of interest: https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-wa...

I can push that market to 100% with 10k usd so I wouldn’t weight that too strongly as evidence, although I agree on the tariffs part.
> Guess what happened next?

Stimulus and zero interest rate followed by 10% inflation.

and that inflation was (partially) due to the lack of supply of production (say, of cars). Which is due to the lack of supply of components (that was cancelled due to expectation of low demand, as well as various shipping/cargo issues in the ensuing period).
A gigantic contracyclic fiscal policy was adopted to sustain demand.

Do you think Trump and the GOP will do that anytime soon?

At least until such time as his polling stumbles the GOP will do absolutely anything he says. And Trump will do whatever it takes to keep the grease coming in, I really think him turning on the printing presses is a long from the least likely scenario.

Would the GOP have to eat large quantities of excrement, yes. Have they become used to doing that (cf Epstein), yes.

Short the stock market then if you feel a recession is coming
> Back in my economics classes at college, a professor pointed out that a stock market can go up for two reasons

Reason #1 is lower interest rates, which increase the present value of future cash flows in DCF models. A professor who does not mention that does not know what they are talking about.

That's a subset of "shares becoming more valuable"
Not in the way legitser wrote:

>On one hand, the economy is legitimately growing and shares are becoming more valuable

The implication here is that output and productivity is growing. Not that money is becoming less valuable. A more precise term than “valuable” is purchasing power.

Are Americans gaining purchasing power? Not really, because equity gains are being cancelled out by currency losses, if you’re an American that is lucky enough to even own significant equity.

Likewise on all downward business signals at my employer. I was thankfully in school during 09, but this easily feels like the biggest house of cards I have ever experienced as an adult.
Econ professor espousing on the stock market lol. As someone with a couple dumb fancy Econ degrees and whose career has been quite good in the stock market, this comment made me laugh.
Why? Everyone knows the stock market can be irrational and disconnected from the economy.

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