“Doubt is not a pleasant condition,” Voltaire noted, “but certainty is absurd.” When it comes to the US economy, doubt is growing and there is not just zero certainty but historic levels of uncertainty.

The good news is that the economy has been strong. Post-pandemic, corporate profits have hit record highs, the unemployment rate — at 4% — is at historic lows, and US GDP was up 2.5% last year, with consumer spending powering those gains, despite inflation concerns. The bad news is that anxiety over President Trump’s ever-changing trade policy threatens to flip the positive to negative and has triggered recession concerns.

The Big-R has entered the chat, but it’s unlikely an official one has started or will anytime soon. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)’s Business Cycle Dating Committee is the de facto arbiter of what constitutes a significant and persistent decline in economic activity. The eight economists in that group consider several factors, including gross domestic product, real income, payroll employment, and consumer spending, before making a judgment. That means many things must go wrong before recession fears are proven right.

Financial journalists like to define a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP, and most (but not all) of NBER-identified recessions include that measure. That’s because the committee considers the depth and breadth of a downturn — sometimes, small, consecutive dips don’t register.

Tariff-ying Signals

Policy uncertainty, particularly around how tariffs will ripple through the economy, continued to stoke recession fears last week. A bit of added context around the headlines may help separate signal from noise:

• Experts said a decline in convenience-store sales volume suggests Americans could be harder hit in discretionary spending. But that could also be by virtue of health-conscious buyers steering clear of the Doritos and Newports.
• American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Southwest Airlines dialed back their revenue forecasts for the first quarter, citing softer demand. One reason was consumer spending, but another was the spate of airline mishaps and crashes spooking travelers. Plus, Delta chief Ed Bastian told CNBC that the first quarter has been historically “tough to project.”

The fear factor was ratcheted up a notch when the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model rang the alarm last week, forecasting a 2.8% decline in economic growth in the first quarter of this year. However, according to Matthew Klein of The Overshoot, the estimate is skewed by gold flows that are not usually counted in GDP.

Henny Pennys would be soothed to know that at least one real-time recession indicator isn’t flashing. The Sahm rule, developed in 2019 by economist Claudia Sahm to help policymakers respond to early signs of a downturn, states that when the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate is half a percentage point or more above its previous 12-month low, it would indicate recession. That threshold has not been triggered.

DOGE Dodge: Also, while the impact of DOGE cuts to the government workforce is expected to land in the next jobs report, it won’t sink the economy. According to Sahm, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s contribution to the unemployed workforce is “unlikely” to cause a recession, though it adds risks. “About 100,000 workers have either taken deferred resignation or been laid off so far. Even if the total reduction doubles by the end of the year, it would still fall far short of a recessionary shock,” she said.

Throwing your fists in the air and screaming “Fergusoooooon” is not quite as much fun as yelling “Khaaaaaaaan,” now is it? Nevertheless, Big Tech has plenty of reasons to curse the name of President Trump’s Federal Trade Commission chair, Andrew Ferguson, as loudly as it did his predecessor, Lina Khan.

Last week, the trustbusting agency moved forward with two pending cases from the Khan era — one against Amazon and another against Microsoft — signaling that tough antitrust regulation may not lighten up in the Trump 2.0 era after all.

Who You Gonna Call?

Whether Ferguson would continue Khan’s era of strict antitrust enforcement had been something of an open question. But now it’s clear that Big Tech will remain in the FTC’s crosshairs — though there are signs of some debate within the agency:

• According to a Bloomberg report last week, Ferguson’s FTC has continued investigative work on a wide-ranging probe into Microsoft launched by Khan in the waning days of the Biden administration. That investigation seeks to find out whether Microsoft abused its market power across its AI and data center operations as well as in software licensing practices.
• The agency also briefly asked a federal judge last week to delay trial in its case alleging Amazon Prime engaged in deceptive practices against subscribers, citing a resources shortfall following DOGE-ordered spending cuts — only to quickly rescind the request, saying the agency has enough resources to meet its deadlines after all. Which means it still plans to take Amazon to trial on September 22, and is also on track for an October 2026 trial in a case alleging antitrust violations in Amazon’s retail business.

For those keeping score at home: The agency may have been slightly battered by Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts, but it is backing Musk in his fight to stop OpenAI from reorganizing as a more traditional for-profit enterprise. In January, before Trump returned to the White House, Ferguson bolstered the agency’s move to support Musk. Microsoft, for its part, seems to be preparing to part ways with its quasi-subsidiary OpenAI, potentially in light of the FTC’s antitrust scrutiny. Earlier this month, The Information reported that the company was developing its own AI reasoning models to directly compete with OpenAI.

So Shiny, So Chrome: Elsewhere in Washington, the FTC’s trustbusting partners at the Department of Justice appear similarly focused on a Big Tech crackdown. Last week, the Senate confirmed Trump nominee and longtime Big Tech critic Gail Slater to lead the DoJ’s antitrust division. Two weeks ago, the agency reaffirmed its Biden-era mission to break up Google, saying in filings that it is still asking the court to force the company to divest its Chrome browser — and possibly its Android division — after winning a suit last year claiming the tech giant maintained an illegal monopoly in the search business.

Timing is incredibly important in flying, and Boeing’s is both on the money and off schedule.

The embattled aviation giant announced last week that it had sustained its best production levels in two years, following a run of scandals that left it hemorrhaging billions of dollars. Then a trade war showed up that could hand a major advantage to its chief rival.

Trading Aerospaces

In recent years, Boeing had churned out a royal palace’s worth of scandals, most tragically the deadly crashes of 737 Max 8 jets in 2018 and 2019. Among the too-many incidents to name from last year were a 737 Max 9 losing a door plug in mid-flight, a wheel falling off a plane after takeoff near San Francisco, and a 737’s engine catching fire in mid-air above Texas.

Multiple whistleblower allegations alleging substandard safety practices rocked the company’s reputation, and an FAA audit found “multiple instances” where Boeing and supplier Spirit Aerosystems “allegedly failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements” in relation to the door-plug incident. In August 2024, Kelly Ortberg became the planemaker’s third CEO in five years and walked right into a machinist strike that shut down much of the company’s operations for seven weeks. Boeing lost almost $1 billion a month in 2024.

So even as it reported a $3.86 billion loss in the fourth quarter last Tuesday, Boeing’s stock jumped 6% because executives said it delivered 44 aircraft in February, up from 27 in the same month a year ago. That was essentially even with January’s 45 deliveries, which were the best since 2023. After years in the wilderness, visions of a long overdue turnaround were here. And then the trade war began:

• President Trump announced 25% tariffs on all imports of steel and aluminum, important materials for aircraft production and thus likely increasing costs for Boeing which is still, by the by, hemorrhaging money. Lundquist Group Managing Director Jerrold Lundquist, who studies the aerospace business, wrote that Boeing is the largest single US importer and that a Boeing 737 alone has roughly 2,000 parts that come from 700 suppliers. Canada exports 80% of its aerospace products and 56% of those go to the US, he noted.
• AerCap CEO Aengus Kelly, who leads the world’s largest aircraft-leasing company, told CNBC that in a worst-case scenario where the US and Europe implement 25% blanket retaliatory tariffs against one another, a Boeing 787’s cost would increase by $40 million. “No one’s going to want to pay that,” he said, adding that it would allow the company’s chief rival, Airbus, to claim 75% to 80% of the global market.

Pole Position: Airbus, which unlike Boeing has not been hampered by a series of production stops and starts by regulators as well as a strike, has booked 65 net orders this year compared with Boeing’s 41.