Vibecession Is a Misleading Indicator for Recession

All that vibecession talk in the past year raised concerns that an actual recession was just around the corner. But hard economic data hasn’t supported what the ‘soft’ sentiment indicators have been heralding. Worrying about a recession doesn’t mean one is inevitable.

Since the pandemic, consumers have been pretty pessimistic. And that’s understandable. It’s a pandemic after all. What’s there to be happy about? Still, once people started getting the vaccines, which meant an end to lockdowns and huge infection waves, you would have thought consumer sentiment would pick up. And it did for a while. But then the supply chain issues and inflation crushed hopes and consumer sentiment drifted down to lows in June.