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People really want Trump to be an economic disaster and sorry, it's just not playing out that way. There's no doubt his policies have reduced growth relative to an alternative baseline, but the US economy is in great shape for the near to medium term, even more so given everything he's thrown at it.

People have been telling me this for two years now and I'm sorry y'all are wrong lol

I'm just going to block people that get mad about quantifying economic data instead of relying on the worst possible anecdote, because it's boring, but objectively the US economy is not weak. Unlike anti-chart people I actually get paid to do this for a living so I kinda know what I'm talking about.

To quantify, I would say through the end of CY 2027 (so ~15 months). By "great shape" I mean recording steady real growth above recent trends, rising productivity, rising employment, and low recession risk. Fine to apply a different qualitative descriptor, but that's my forecast.

Nicholas Grossman@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social

I'll take the other side of that prediction for medium term. You're predicting that macroeconomic data a year from now will indicate an economy in great shape, yes? I expect the negative impacts of the Iran war to be more apparent then, so I predict mediocre at best, not great. I guess we'll see.

Yeah, I'm thinking macroeconomic data here, not vague impressions. GDP growth in 2023-24 was about 2.7%, 2025 slowed to 2.1%, and the most recent quarter (Q2 2026, the one after the war began) was 1.5%. Already below trend. Employment has largely stagnated, and decreased in the most recent month.

Q3 is tracking 4.8%, consensus forecast has us at 2.1% for 2026 CY (and given 2.1%, 1.5%, and 4.8% would be on the low end). No question that GDP has slowed in 2025 but there's no indication it will slow further, and it's happening with extremely low jobs growth that is now flipping the other way.

Another factor may be that the government isn’t actually *doing* anything. Apart from triggering the risk of a global energy crisis (!), the Executive is basically performative. And Congress has kinda given up. So perhaps what we see in the data is an economy largely on autopilot?

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