The economy is a very complex system but often a single factor can impact it significantly.
Some of that is simply mathematical but some of it is also based on psychological factors.
Everyone is always trying to predict how something impacts the overall economy, because the most successful strategy is to be ahead of the crowd, but not so far ahead as to go broke waiting for them to catch up to where you are.
So what about this economy?
In many ways it is considered robust, but is it?
Three areas that are still weak are manufacturing, mining and farming.
In 2004 there were over 13 million workers in manufacturing. This dropped to less than 11 million during the financial crisis and has been slowly improving since. However, the latest numbers show us still down over a million workers. Considering population growth there are less manufacturing jobs available. Still we have grown from the lowest point and we see that data claimed as a measure of an improved economy.
The big increase in employment has been in service jobs and generally they don't pay as well as manufacturing.
So the average American is having more trouble paying bills and saving for the future, even if fully employed.
This is one of the reason that we see so much income and wealth inequality, since the workers continue to get a smaller share of the pie as they are forced into lower paying jobs.
It wouldn't take much, maybe some increased cost because of tariffs to make the whole thing tumble.
Time will tell.
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