Edit: Phone post. There will be a few typos. Ex greatest ones instead of black swan.

It sounds like you're smashing together a lot of sensationalized views and over-extrapolated trends.

The US economy exited a period where the economy was extremely overheated and there was labor hoarding, especially in tech, due to labor shortages. The expectation was that this would unwind quickly post 2020, but (as is almost always the case with people predicting cyclical macro factors) this behavior tapered down slower than expectation.

No, we are not seeing a meltdown. No, it is not reasonable to predict an 07-08 style recession (that was a collateral, liquidity, and credit crisis. People bring up the GFC because of hindsight bias. There are better historical parallels to reference if that's the direction you want to go in. The banking crisis a couple of years ago started to look a little bit like that, but even that was much closer to the Savings and Loan Crisis.)

I look at macro indicators and analysis every day and have for years, and I'd recommend not making future predictions about macro unless you really know what you're doing. It's almost always a negative value ad vs being mentally agnostic. By the way, most professional participants do not know what they're doing. For example, a couple of years ago, there was a recession mania that included extreme positioning in hedge funds and sophisticated investors, and I found that extremely easy to fade because all I do is look at data, look at data, look at data. There are a lot of biases that you need to unlearn and there are a lot of non-intuitive things like rate of change (and even rate of change of rate of change) mattering more than levels. It's just too esoteric to get any value as it tourist these days, and it's such a financialized economy. For example, coming out of the banking crisis, why did things recover so quickly when it comes to liquidity? Because fixed income volatility went down and balance sheet capacity went up. Because central banks' main job has nothing to do with money printing and everything to do with controlling volatility. Because bond issuance was twisted and reverse repo absorbed short-end issuance, equaling a massive liquidity injection. Since companies are so hyper-financialized, you get all these esoteric factors feeding into what drives hiring and layoffs and capex. Then you also need to be looking at places like China, which almost nobody understands in the US although, everyone in the trading industry seems to have strong opinions, don't they?

Just keep it simple. I'd strongly recommend listening to a top level casual weekly podcast like Macro Mondays or Market Huddle, or the occasional Darius Dale interview. That will do 10x more than reading daily papers. Maybe read a good chart firehose like Market Ear.

Then keep it simple. US growth is strong. US consumer spending looked like it was weakening, maybe precipitously, but now it looks... pretty strong. US corporate profitability is quite strong. Consumer sentiment readings are improving and liquidity is fine, although, perhaps there are greatest ones in the banking system still. Don't try to predict that, though, unless you really have a killer argument.

So I don't know what else to say. The US is doing pretty well, and maybe it looks a bit late-cycle. If you want to predict from here, there are things you need to understand. And one of the big ones is that seeing a shift from this holding pattern usually requires a catalyst. An unknown unknown. To break down the known unknowns, you need to know what is price stand and what is not price stand when it comes to actual positioning and the economy and also within expectation. For example, right now it looks like Trump is quite priced into the market. Inflation picking back up could also bring out some swans. So if I wanted to make predictions, I'd be watching inflation indicators in particular right now. Especially any sort of stagflationary line from here, and I'd be looking at sentiment and positioning indicators in parallel.

When it comes to layoffs, the mass layoffs have been sensationalized in the media. Yes, they obviously exist, and yes, it has been sensationalized. If you're talking about a recession, you need to be looking at things like WARN notices unexpectedly flooding in. When it comes to job numbers, well that's a whole other mess right now. And that's probably not something you want to wade into. One of the other recession lines you need to be watching is along the lines of the general view that once unemployment starts to rise, it continues to rise. Sahm rule and all of that.

IMO just listen to one of those weekly podcasts I linked, do it weekly for a year and you'll be pretty in tune with what's actually going on. Then be mostly agnostic about the outlook, but be realistic with yourself when it comes to the immediate data.