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| New to the newsletter? Subscribe to The Daily Money to get the best consumer and financial news from USA TODAY delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. And give our news-inspired Spotify playlist a listen. It features every song quoted here. |
| Happy Friday, Daily Money readers. We finally made it. Jayme Deerwester back with you. |
Are we in a recession? |
| It's tempting to say that the U.S. is inching toward a recession (commonly defined as a significant decline in economic activity for at least two quarters), or it's already in one. |
| At least that's the takeaway some economists had from Thursday's GDP report, which showed that the U.S. economy shrank at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.4% in the first quarter of 2022. A steep pullback in exports resulting from supply chain bottlenecks had the most significant drag on GDP last quarter. |
| Recessions range in duration, from the 2-month-long one in 2020 to the Great Recession of 2007-2009, which lasted 18 months. The average is 10.3 months. |
| Economists are all over the map with their predictions for this one, with Deutsche Bank economists predicting "we will get a major recession" beginning in late 2023 or early 2024 and PNC Bank saying "the U.S. economy is not anywhere close to recession." Many, however, are expecting a mild downturn. |
📰 More headlines you can't miss 📰 |
| RECESSIONS AND INVESTING: Guarding your portfolio against a 2023 US recession means doing little. |
| WILL DISNEY DITCH FLORIDA? We unravel the complicated issues in DeSantis versus Mouse. |
| CAR RECALLS: Ford, Lexus, Mercedes, Nissan all issued bulletins this week. |
| DOXX-PROOFING YOURSELF: Google to let people remove phone numbers, addresses from search. |
| MEET WARREN BUFFETT'S SUCCESSOR: Greg Abel is a 'regular guy' from Iowa with 'shocking workload.' |
Amazon earnings down, Apple's up (but with a dire prediction) |
| Amazon reported its first quarterly loss since 2015 on Thursday, its money-making juggernaut stalled by a slowdown in pandemic-induced online shopping and a huge write-down of its investment in an electric-vehicle startup. It wasn't all bad news, as the company's cloud-computing business' earnings rose 37% and advertising sales were up 25%. |
| Still, the slowdown in online spending is real and broad-based. While in-store sales rose, March is the first month to show decline in online sales since the pandemic began, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse. |
| Apple reported strong quarterly results despite supply shortages, but warned that its growth slowdown is likely to deepen. The company said it's still struggling to get enough chips to meet demand and contending with COVID-related shutdowns at factories in China that make iPhones and other products. |
| The main takeaway: Apple's sales will be squeezed by the supply problems much harder in the current April-June quarter than in its previous one. The company estimated it would take a hit to revenue of $4 billion to $8 billion as a result. |
| "It will affect most of the product categories," Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts. |
| 🎧 Mood music 🎧 |
| The Great Recession and the short-lived COVID recession both inspired a bunch of rap tracks, but today, I'm going with the OG economic stress song, Grandmaster Flash's 1982 classic, "The Message." |
| "Don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the edge. I'm trying not to lose my head. Ah-huh-huh-huh, it's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under." |
| LISTEN WHILE YOU WORK: You can hear just about every song quoted in the newsletter on the Daily Money Mood Music playlist on Spotify. |
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