I'm seeing a lot of "one easy answer" type posts for this data, and I thought I'd contribute my own hypothesis as to why an economic downturn of some sort seems inevitable. Bearing in mind this is grossly oversimplified, and an eensy bit hostile in tone, and written from one of the internet's multitudes of "armchair theorists", so take it all with a healthy dose of skepticism.

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On the one hand, you've got a tech industry so addicted to ZIRP that they've actively been trying to engineer a recession since COVID's interest rate hikes. They don't want to adapt to a new norm of low interest rates, they want zero interest rates so they can take out all the debt they need to justify share buybacks, AI and Quantum investments, and further industry consolidation around infinite services rather than tangible products. To those types of leaders, the pain is the point, and a means to their end of depressing wages and fueling more artificial growth.

That said, they're ultimately a drop in the current bucket. Once the current President got elected, businesses immediately began bulk-importing ahead of tariffs to preserve margins, in the hopes they could lobby to get them dropped again like last time. That is not happening, partly because one of their own is President de facto if not President de jure, and this man is rampaging like a petulant toddler through the ranks of the Civil Service. Laying off and outright firing a bunch of workers - surprising absolutely nobody with a basic grasp of economics - has knock-on effects on the larger economy. Those people have bills to pay, and often took lower-paying Civil Service gigs for the stability of the role - something the economy adapted to as dependable and reliable income streams. That image has been irreparably shattered, and Civil Servants are viewed as the same unstable debtor as private sector workers, surviving not even admin-to-admin anymore. This means employers are nervous about their hiring practices, eliminating open roles (the "Job Market Freeze" as it's being called) and not backfilling others, with a prime example being the tech sector refusing to hire developers and claiming AI will replace them.

Anyway, so we have tariffs squeezing already-declining consumer demand as COVID surpluses have dried up, a demolished civil servant base (the Federal Government is the single largest employer in the country, and possibly the Earth inclusive of its multitude of other, oft-excluded branches), and an unstable Executive Branch more focused on agendas of hatred and vengeance than sound economic policies.

That still only scratches the surface.

Compounding the above are asset prices and inflation, both of which I'm going to grossly oversimplify and lump into the "infinite growth" problem category. The only thing holding back the human species from stripmining the entire planet is policy, and that policy has been globally manipulated and hollowed out to funnel cash upward from the working class worldwide. It's not an American problem, and it's not a Capitalism problem (Communist and Feudalist countries have had the exact same issue). By funneling more wealth into fewer hands, there's less avenues for production of goods and services other than "rental" markets (like streaming, or XaaS) - a market segment that's been infamously toxic with bad returns in the long run relative to other investments, though always buoyed by better-than-expected returns in the short-to-mid terms as investors seek market capture through "disruption". Paradoxically, giving consumers the ability to own actually increases economic output to a degree, especially if products are well-made and repairable, by propping up local craftspersons and small businesses; perpetual "rental" services focus that capital into very few hands, and deter such knock-on economic expansion, which ultimately slows growth.

And that growth is the problem every country faces right now. The past century (post-WW2 in particular) has been strongly focused on growth at the expense of all else, and that was never sustainable in the long run. Until and unless we actually have (practically) infinite resource extraction, refinement, and re-utilization, infinite growth is functionally impossible - and even then, growth would be limited to the sum total of the value of resources effectively exploited in a closed-loop supply chain. When growth halts or slows, we get recessions as the investor class, greed impossible to satiate even in the best of times, withdraws from markets until such time that new industry or technological innovation creates the illusion of infinite growth yet again. With population growth stagnating (due to wealth inequality - go compare birth rates to wealth inequality ratios historically to see how neatly those two inverse one another), this also threatens systems built with the presumption of infinite growth forever - like government welfare programs based on low taxes and high population/wage growth, rather than higher taxes and fixed benefits.

So now we circle all the way back to the beginning, and my hypothesis on the potential recession:

* Consumer sentiment is low because people keep getting laid off, wages remain flat, RTO mandates eat away at time and money savings the pandemic created, and asset prices remain unaffordably high for the 90%

* Business confidence is low because higher tariffs disproportionately impact American businesses who import most goods, and a dysfunctional Federal Government more focused on tantrums, authoritarianism, and identity politics than effective governance weakens that confidence further since lobbying is no longer a guarantee of outcome

* International confidence in American institutions (government and private alike) is decreasing as a result of highly-public meltdowns of both the President de jure and the President de facto, forcing many developed economies to reconsider their business and political relationships with the world's largest economy.

* A hollowed out economic core that focused exclusively on services (which can and are continuously outsourced) in lieu of diversity of industry, making it incredibly vulnerable to outside market and political forces

* A capital class that believes it can escape any harm by simply relocating elsewhere

And that's my position. I'm definitely oversimplifying complex issues for the sake of brevity (economic diversification, asset valuations, the housing crisis, etc), but I think my core position is pretty sturdy.