 Where is that darn recession that everybody's been talking about for so long? Today, we take a little look into the Austrian school and some of the indicators that we follow in terms of predicting a recession. Now, Austrians in 2017, 2018, and 2019 were predicting a looming economic recession or crisis in the economy. As a matter of fact, the institute published a small book called Anatomy of the Crash, The Financial Crisis of 2020, which of course did not happen because of COVID, the COVID emergency conditions, the government lockdowns, and all the craziness that happened at that time. But COVID emergency spending, over five trillion dollars of government money, over five trillion dollars of federal reserve credit injected into the economy, people were generally thinking that there would be a recession as a consequence of all this runaway government expenditure. Nowadays, the calls for and predictions of recessions are very tempered and reserved. People are talking about the Fed avoiding a recession. They're talking about a soft landing or a minor recession. But nobody's really talking about a significant economic recession or an economic crisis in the mainstream media. So Austrians, with their theory, missed the call in terms of a financial crisis in 2020. The circumstances are obvious, but I want to point out that that's always the case with Austrian predictions, is that they're always subject to changing events and policies that can make their predictions backfire, at least on a statistical basis. GDP can be influenced by massive government spending. And investment can be influenced, changed, altered by massive increases in the amount of credit that's being injected into the economy. But now, where do we stand right now after the Keynesian COVID bonanza of government is largely over? They only have four hundred billion dollars left to spend. So what we've seen is that the Federal Reserve has increased interest rates significantly after a very long period of zero interest rates and quantitative easing. We've seen major regional bank failures. We've also seen recently a decline in corporate earnings, corporate profits, indicating recessions coming our way. Even though people see recovery in corporate profits and corporate earnings, real wages in the economy are declining, even though nominal wages have been increasing in particular industries. But inflation is eating away the purchasing power of everybody's wages. And that inflationary effect, or real wages, has been declining, which also indicates a high probability of recession. In particular, there's been a decrease in discretionary spending and the inventories held of discretionary goods, luxury goods. Target has indicated that there's problems with its customers, home depot and lows, which is not only discretionary and home improvements, but also the housing industry more general. There's been a decline in real GDP, not very much so far, but if we take a look at the leading economic indicators, they were up over 10% in 2021. They came down and hit zero during 2022 and now they're at negative 8%. So the leading economic indicators are declining. And while it's an exact measure, it does indicate more likelihood of a recession happening. Americans now are back to the level of the housing bubble in terms of the percentage of American adults who own stocks or stock mutual funds. So we're fully reinvested and of course real estate has greatly expanded over the last couple of years. So the investment side, the mail investment side is up there. And housing prices are still 50% higher than they were during the housing bubble. And as I said, gross domestic product or the measure of the overall economy, it's sort of stabilized. It hasn't gone down drastically. It's not going up drastically. But there's been an additional $1 trillion of increased total government expenditures in the economy over the last year. So the fact that it's stabilized and hasn't turned down that much is not very reassuring. So while the mainstream media tends to paint a very reassuring picture of the economy going forward and as Federal Reserve officials try to downplay the destructive capacity of their own actions and try to paint a rather bright picture of the future, the indicators that many Austrians look at have turned down already and are painting a picture of a recession, if not an economic crisis.