You know the business cycle, right?

Expansion and contraction?

What's another word for economic contraction?

From American public media, this is Market Flats. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzell.

It is Tuesday.

Today, this is the 18th of March.

Good as always.

Stab me along, everybody.

You've heard the chatter out there, haven't you?

Maybe even joined in a bit that, you know, maybe with the tariffs and the chaos and the markets and all of it,

that maybe there's a recession coming?

I mean, maybe there is.

We don't know.

But it sure would be handy to know what to look for, wouldn't it? The telltale signs? Here's Marketplace's Kristen Schwab.

Before we get into what's at play in the economy right now, let's remind ourselves what's been happening for the last few years, or even the last few months.

Samuel Zeefe is global macro strategist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank. A lot of the risks to the U.S. economy were to the upside.

U.S.

upside because since the COVID recession, which lasted just two months,

he says the economy has been hot, a little too hot,

with strong GDP growth, a strong job market, and strong consumer spending.

And those measures have continued to mostly hold up.

So much so that in this story about recession indicators,

...