Here we go again. The sky is falling.
Do you remember watching CNBC and reading the popular business press like the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance, and others back when interest rates started to climb? To be sure, the Fed was making the right pre-emptive moves against the sudden shock of inflation that came about as a result of all the stimulus liquidity that had money jingling in consumers’ pockets, coupled with supply chain disruptions that pushed up prices on many goods because of their scarcity. All of these talking heads and columnists were wailing and gnashing their teeth about the forthcoming recession the interest rate spike was surely going to cause.
I vividly remember driving to the airport at 5:15 a.m. one morning to catch an early flight, and tuned into one of my favorite business radio channels for my usual dose of early news and data, and the outlook for the markets. Some financial pundit was being interviewed, giving all the reasons why the recent spate of good economic news was just wrong, and that we were headed to recession. He cited ever-rising interest rates and diminishing consumer savings that will soon run out, therefore stopping the flow of consumer spending. And he predicted housing prices will start to descend and then plunge, then added all manner of other reasons why the current reporting of strength in our economy will be short-lived.
It didn’t happen. And we preached all along it wasn’t going to happen.
Today, the Chicken Littles are back in full force, coating the popular business press with their downbeat view of what lies ahead. They blab that the job market is weakening, inflation is still too high, and we’re at serious risk of a once-in-50-years oil shock. They compare this to the set of conditions that triggered the stagflation of the 1970s, which at the time was America’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. They claim the economy’s warning lights might not yet be flashing red, but they are certainly flashing yellow.
They go on to complain the jobs report showed that the U.S. labor market lost 92,000 jobs in February, causing the unemployment rate to rise to 4.4 percent. The numbers for the previous two months, which had suggested decent job growth, were also revised downward: January now showed fewer job gains than initially estimated and December showed overall job losses. These new numbers continue the trend of last month’s revisions, which showed that the economy had added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, a tenth of the jobs that had been added the year prior.
And there is more: a report released by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis in February showed that economic growth slowed dramatically in the final months of last year, from 4.4 percent in the third quarter down to just 1.4 percent, bringing total yearly growth to its lowest level since the pandemic decimated the economy in 2020. Another report from the BEA showed that prices had risen by 3 percent in December compared with a year prior, the highest rate of inflation since April 2024.
The worst job numbers since the Great Recession, the slowest economic growth since COVID, and the worst inflation in nearly two years are all signs of a faltering economy, they claim. And their view that the U.S.-Iran war carries a very high risk of triggering an energy crisis if it lasts for more than a few weeks, the kind of crisis that experts believe could cause the price of oil to double or triple from its current level.
Well, I will stick my neck out once again and dismiss all of the above as prattle from Chicken Littles. The strong economic tailwind of AI, the data center boom, the overall strength of the construction sector, and many other key economic indicators we follow simply point to an economy that will remain stable despite the silly pronouncements from the Chicken Littles.