As the war in Ukraine and China's sweeping lockdowns upend the post-pandemic recovery, storm clouds are gathering for the global economy and the forecast looks grim, with research firm Ned Davis declaring in September that there's a 98% chance of global recession.
Read on for 27 worrying signs that a full-blown recession is looming. All dollar values in US dollars.
Definitions vary, but we'll define a "global recession" pretty loosely as an extended period of declining worldwide economic activity. One of the most obvious signs of an imminent downturn is the recent succession of GDP growth projection downgrades, with the World Bank, IMF and OECD all slashing their forecasts for 2022 and 2023. The OECD's interim Economic Outlook report this September made for grim reading, declaring: "The world's economy is slowing more than anticipated".
The US housing market is showing signs of a slowdown, with consensus growing on Wall Street that house prices are beginning to fall across America. The predictions are stark. In late September, Morgan Stanley announced that it expects a sharp decline in prices of 7%, while Goldman Sachs and Moody’s Analytics independently predicted a fall between 5% and 10%. Not only is a decline in house prices rare, but such a precipitous drop in prices indicates real economic trouble. As Fortune pointed out, a double-digit fall has only occurred twice: in the Great Depression, and in the Great Recession.
Outside the US, house prices are more buoyant right now, but cracks are still beginning to show in the form of a slowdown in homebuilding and permits issued, which suggest cooling markets, not to mention recession. Construction has slumped in the US and UK, while the number of new-build permits issued has dropped in the US, Australia and elsewhere.
A classic recession indicator, and Wall Street's go-to according to Bloomberg, an "inverted yield curve" occurs when short-term yields on government bonds outpace long-term returns. Right now, a slew of key economies have an inverted yield curve, from the UK to Turkey and Brazil.
On 5 July, Reuters reported that the US yield curve had inverted again after already having done so twice already this year. According to global investment strategist Anu Gaggar, the past six recessions began on average between six and 36 months after curve inversion.
Governments, businesses and individuals alike have been spending like no tomorrow these past few years. Looking back over history, some of the deepest and most damaging recessions came about following a period of excessive spending, according to John Hilsenrath of the Wall Street Journal. These big downturns include the Great Recession, which was preceded by the housing bubble, and the recession of the early 2000s, a consequence of the dot-com boom.
Prices have been soaring around the world in recent months, largely due to pent-up demand in the wake of the pandemic alongside supply issues amid the war in Ukraine and severe lockdowns in China. Energy and food costs have smashed records and inflation has climbed to levels we haven't seen in decades. And as Bank of America put it in April, inflation always precedes recessions.
Interest rates have been going up as central banks move to combat rising prices. They did the opposite at the height of the pandemic to avoid recession. As a succession of economies from the US and UK to Switzerland hike up interest rates, the danger is that achieving a "soft landing" – ie avoiding harm to the economy – can be tricky. Rate increases all too often make borrowing so expensive that spending drops off a cliff, making a recession inevitable.
Recessions tend to be preceded by a period of tighter government spending too, particularly if this follows a public sector spending spree. Governments have wound down COVID financial support and stimulus payments, as well as increasing the tax burden, in a bid to balance the books. The end result is less disposable income for many people, leading to a downturn in spending and more personal debt.
That said, the chief factor that's likely to lead to reduced consumer spending across the board, and so a heightened risk of recession, is a decline in real-terms wages – ie pay adjusted for inflation. Unfortunately, as pay struggles to keep up with inflation, real wages in the UK have shrunk at the fastest rate in two decades, and real hourly earnings in the US fell by a painful 3% between May 2021 and May 2022.
A series of experts have sounded stark warnings of late that recession is on the horizon for many countries. A survey in June by British newspaper the Financial Times and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business found that 70% of the 49 economists polled expect the US to fall into recession in 2023, while many experts have issued dismal forecasts for the UK, France and other leading economies.
The latest alarm bell has been rung by research firm Ned Davis, which in late September published a model showing a 98.1% probability of global recession. Ned Davis' indicator has only come out with such a high probability twice before: during the COVID-related downturn of 2020, and amid the onset of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.
The world's richest person Elon Musk has also entered the fray, telling Tesla executives recently that he has "a super bad feeling" about the economy, having already hinted in May at a deep global recession. On 21 June, Musk hardened his view, asserting that a recession is "inevitable." Other billionaires who see a severe downturn on the horizon include JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, and leading investors Carl Icahn, Leon Cooperman and Jeffrey Gundlach.
The world's business leaders are similarly pessimistic, with the war in Ukraine weighing heavily on their minds. More than three-quarters of the 750 top CEOs surveyed by business membership and research group The Conference Board in May said they expected a global recession to occur within 12 to 18 months, up from just 22% at the same time last year.
Consumer sentiment, which is basically how optimistic people feel about their personal finances and the economy, is another useful barometer, with a decline indicating that a recession is on its way. And it's not looking good right now. Consumer sentiment across the US and UK has hit record lows, and the same can be said for dozens of countries from Canada to Australia.
A recent CBS poll has revealed the scale of the issue in the US. The vast majority of respondents said that they expect the US economy to be in recession (44%) or slowing down (25%) next year, and 75% described the economy as "bad". Most of those polled were also worried about their ability to afford things and save in the coming months.
In a similar vein, monitoring businesses' confidence in the economy can be helpful when it comes to predicting whether recession is likely. Again, the signs are shockingly dismal. Global growth optimism tumbled to a record low earlier this year and small business confidence in the US recently slumped to its lowest-ever level.
With many people fretting about the economy, there's a real risk of a self-fulfilling global recession as people modify their behaviour, spending and investing less and consequently increasing the likelihood of a severe downturn.
With investors spooked, stock markets around the world fell sharply in mid-June, with America's S&P 500 entering bear market territory, having declined by 20% since January. As the New York Times reported on 30 June, the S&P has endured the worst first half of a year in over 50 years. In the US, nine out of the 12 bear markets since 1948 have been accompanied by a recession, meaning the two tend to go hand in hand.
There may be good reason to expect any global recession to be triggered in Europe. Of course, much of the continent has been severely affected by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and supply chain issues resulting from sweeping lockdowns in China haven't helped. The latest economic news from Europe is grim.
In July, amid skyrocketing inflation, Germany announced its very first trade deficit since 1991. Though the deficit was relatively small in global terms at €1 billion, it's worth remembering that, as Spiked magazine puts it, "it’s a bad omen for Germany, whose growth has depended primarily on its exports".
"How much is €1 billion in US dollars?" you may ask. Well that's news in itself: in recent weeks, the answer has been about $1 billion. That's because the value of the euro has plummeted and has neared parity with the dollar for the first time in two decades.
The British pound is arguably in even bigger trouble. Following announcements of a series of uncosted tax cuts on 26 September, the value of the pound plummeted to $1.038 – the lowest it's been since 1971.
Copper is dubbed 'Doctor Copper' in the investing industry since the price of the commodity tends to reflect the health of the global economy. The essential metal has a plethora of industrial uses – eg in wiring, pipes, tools and motors – so a fall in its price indicates a drop in industrial activity, pointing to a recession. The price plunged to a 10-month low on 16 June, and the situation continued to worsen: in the week up to 24 June, the price fell by 6.5% – its largest weekly fall in over a year – and on 1 July the metal reached its lowest price in 17 months.
A few months on and the copper market's prospects aren't looking much better. Despite a meagre recovery in the price of copper since June, Reuters reported on 26 September that it had once again fallen, hitting a two-month low.
Given that China boasts the world's second-largest economy, any slowdown in the country impacts the entire globe. With the unravelling of the nation's real estate market ongoing and strict lockdowns pausing much economic activity, the situation is far from rosy in the People's Republic, with its problems adding to the risk of recession on a global scale.
Another major red flag is this year's tech industry downturn. Companies in the sector that expanded during the pandemic are slimming down as the tech boom comes to an end. Dubbed "the great layoff", firms including Netflix, Coinbase and ByteDance have let go of swathes of their workforce, while Tesla is in the process of shedding 10% of jobs. In recent days, Bloomberg has reported that Facebook's parent company Meta is putting a freeze on hiring, and there are growing fears that thousands of employees could face redundancy in the coming weeks.
Rising unemployment is a quintessential feature of recessions, and while openings are generally plentiful in many countries and the number of jobless relatively low right now, labour markets in the US, UK, China and elsewhere are showing signs of cooling. In fact, a number of major firms such as carmarker Stellantis and mortgage provider Wells Fargo – in addition to the tech titans we've just mentioned – laid off employees over the summer.
The latest worrying development is a sharp drop in the number of job openings across the US. Recent figures, reported by Reuters, reveal that the number of job openings fell by 1.1 million to 10.05 million in August. That's the biggest monthly fall in over two years.
Find out about America's continuing big store closures
The average number of hours worked is a decent recession indicator according to Ryan Sweet of Moody's Analytics. This is because the first thing employers do when the economy is tanking is cut hours. And that's what seems to be happening this year, with a slight reduction in the average hours worked over the past few months in countries like the US, the UK and Australia.
Retail sales offer an excellent insight into how the economy is doing, with declining numbers indicating that a recession could be imminent as hard-up customers tighten their belts and rein in spending. Over the past few months, retail sales have dropped markedly in China, Germany, the US, the UK and Switzerland, especially compared to the same period last year.
When a recession is on the way, sales fall and business inventories increase as a result, so analysts closely monitor the volumes of raw materials, unfinished and finished goods that manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are holding. Right now, the experts are clearly becoming concerned since inventories rose strongly in the US during April.
The UK has experienced a particularly sharp fall in retail sales, largely due to sky-high inflation, with Reuters reporting a 1.6% drop in retail volumes in August.
Factory orders are down in Germany and other countries around the world, and unsurprisingly manufacturing output has fallen in the European industrial powerhouse, as well as in Japan and the US. According to Bloomberg, this September marked Germany's sixth consecutive month of falling factory orders. Meanwhile, September saw America's manufacturing activity grow at the slowest rate in more than two years as steep interest rate rises hampered demand.
China, the world's leading manufacturing nation, has also teetered between feeble manufacturing growth and output decline this year, with a sharp drop in output of 2.9% back in April. On 30 September, ABC News reported on the continued sluggish growth of China's factory activity, noting that the stagnation "adds to complications for Chinese leaders who are trying to reverse an economic slump after growth fell to 2.2% in the first six months of 2022, less than half the 5.5% official target".
This drop in output across the world points to a serious downturn in the global economy.
Interestingly, the current situation is similar to that following the Spanish flu of 1918. Like today, the world's supply chains were disrupted in the wake of a pandemic and inflation jumped. Central banks pushed up interest rates and major economies including the US and UK slipped into the so-called Forgotten Depression of 1920-21.
A CNBC article back in April highlighted some quite unconventional and unexpected economic indicators of a coming recession. The "Skyscraper Index", for example, links recessions to the construction of the world's tallest buildings. With this in mind, it's worth noting that the world's second-loftiest building, Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka 118 tower, is due for completion later this year. And that's just one of at least 15 super-tall skyscrapers currently being finished off worldwide, according to architecture and design magazine Dezeen.
As the architect of the skyscraper index, British economist Andrew Lawrence, has explained, the building of skyscrapers tends to come at the end of a cycle of growth, "cap[ping] off what is a large building boom".
Might there be other signs of impending economic doom? Skyscraper construction might not be the only unusual sign of a downturn. Other leftfield indicators include the lipstick and men's underwear indices: while lipstick sales tend to rise in periods of recession, sales of guys' boxers, briefs and so on dip in tough times. You may also want to keep an eye out for maxi dresses in the stores as, according to the hemline index, skirt lengths rise and fall in tandem with the ups and downs of the global economy...
Now see which major countries are expecting the best (and worst) growth this year