About a month ago, based on those Q4 2018 reports that had not been delayed by the government shutdown, plus workarounds for those that were missing, I went of “Recession Watch” for Q4 of this year.

Now all of the missing pieces have been reported, and they add to the evidence justifying the call. 

This post is up at Seeking Alpha.

My base case remains slowdown vs. recession. But I see a slowdown becoming more entrenched as the year goes on, and government policy missteps (good thing we have a competent Administration, so we won’t see any of those! /s) could easily tip us into contraction. If we do go that route, it probably won’t be led by the producer side of the economy, but rather by stretched budgets on the consumer side.