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You know the business cycle, right? Expansion and contraction. What's another word for economic

contraction?

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzell. It is Tuesday. Today, this is the 18th of March. Good as always.

To have you 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, 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. economy, 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, I shouldn't even really run you through

the classic red flag predictors like rising unemployment or an inverted yield curve showing up in the

bond market. The hard data actually point to a strong economy.

Where we are seeing some signs of softening is in soft data. Sorry to use the word twice.

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