For over a year now, so many people have feared the “R” word coming for the economy that this hypothetical recession has likely become the most widely predicted in history. Why did a recession seem inevitable? It could have been the 10 back-to-back interest rate hikes since last March, or the subsequent drag on housing market activity, or the large-scale culling of jobs across sectors and an extended stock market rout in 2022 that left the economy, especially the tech sector, on edge. Or it could have been all of the above (plus inflation.) But now, a well-known economist says we don’t need to look on the horizon for a recession to come—it’s already here and we all missed it. We were looking in the wrong place, he says.
“Nobody talked about the release of real GDI today,” David Rosenberg, the founder of Rosenberg Research and formerly a chief economist on Wall Street for roughly two decades, at Gluskin Sheff and Merrill Lynch, wrote in a tweet Thursday, referring to the gross domestic income numbers that came out the same day.
