I will start off and saying that I have expected the U.S. to already be in a down economy, but through various economic patches such as fully bailing out banks and providing additional liquidity to protect run on the banks we were able to reduce a significant negative impact on the economy. Additional, items that have helped are the pause student loan payments and various state subsidies.
Unfortunately, these are all patches and at some point they cannot hold and you start getting leaks. We are starting to see those leaks in consumer debt and especially in credit card balances increasing over 30% in less then 2 years and are the highest that they have ever been.
We also seeing higher auto and home loan deliquencies, which indicates consumers are struggling with high costs which ultimtaely will lead to defaults.
In addition we are seeing significant layoffs jobs over the past year and specifically in the tech and financial sectors, which will lead to further layoffs across supporting sectors as well as service industry as people will cut back on spending.
My prediction is that we will begin seeing the markets pull back in Q3/Q4 of 2023 and down economy will last between 2 – 4 years.