If someone, somewhere, were to have a vested interest in keeping consumer spending high in order to stave off a recession, they would at least try find a way to persuade millions of people that There Is No Recession.
I think the basic story behind that WSJ headline is that the financial press makes an overly big deal out of daily market fluctuations which aren’t that relevant to most investors (or most people). Not that they’re trying to trick people into thinking that the economy is doing better than it is.
To pit these two hypotheses against each other (or other hypotheses), you could look at the past couple weeks of financial headlines to see what the WSJ & other financial press said on days when the market went down.
I think the basic story behind that WSJ headline is that the financial press makes an overly big deal out of daily market fluctuations which aren’t that relevant to most investors (or most people). Not that they’re trying to trick people into thinking that the economy is doing better than it is.
To pit these two hypotheses against each other (or other hypotheses), you could look at the past couple weeks of financial headlines to see what the WSJ & other financial press said on days when the market went down.
The same they did during the last recession: insist that there was no recession.