THE DEEPER DIVE: On the Week when the US Slid into Recessionary GDP, Everything Is Showing Signs of Economic Decay

This week’s deeper dive will be a roundup of all the headlines that underpin the move we saw in GDP earlier this week, which took the US down into recession territory. The results of the Trump Tariff Wars and the DOGE firings are beginning to show up, though they are not definitive yet.

I wouldn’t expect them to be quite yet because many of the DOGE firings got temporarily stopped by judicial intervention, and the huge number of shipments cut off by tariffs just started NOT showing up in ports. By now they would have been going into warehouses, and so they are now just starting to NOT show up at warehouses. Even then, warehouses still contain a lot of pre-tariff products from the past, so it is too early to begin showing up to any degree in the form of higher prices on the shelves or shortages.

HOWEVER, all of that is now getting so close you can smell it in the stale air because of the fact that shipments arriving in ports are already way, WAY down from what they were. So, there is a big price to pay not far down the cracked and weedy streets that we need to make sure we are individually ready for.

The easiest approach to that, which I’ve recommended is, whenever you buy something that has a long shelf life, but twice as much so you can salt half of it away while you put the rest on your kitchen shelves. Keep doing that as long as you can. Worst case scenario, if you don’t wind up facing any shortages down the road, it’s all stuff you regularly need, and you likely got it at a better price than will be available then. Once you get a good supply laid in, start using the older stuff while ahead of its “best by” date as you add new when it's available until the risk of shortages has passed.

For now, let’s see what initial evidence there was this week of an economic turn coming in, aside from the greatly decreased shipments that I’ve already covered. We’ll just go right through the week’s news items that I didn't have time to cover. They’re plentiful and all points in the same direction.

The first item was about something that has little to do with tariffs. It was primarily caused by the Covid lockdowns, but it is solid evidence of how long the changes that we intended as a short-term measure can plague us to where they remain even as the next downturn starts adding to them …