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Erik:     Joining me now is ECRI co-founder Lakshman Achuthan. Lak prepared a slide deck to accompany this week's interview. You'll find the download link in your research roundup email. If you don't have a research roundup email, just go to our homepage macrovoices.com. Look for the red button above Lak's picture that says looking for the downloads. Lak two times ago that I last interviewed you was more than a year ago. I think it was last July. We had you back on in February and I want to kind of pick up that conversation because two interviews ago you had just put on I think your recession call saying recession coming. When I interviewed you in February of this year. You reconfirm that and said, yeah, it took a little longer than expected, still coming. So I made a mental note to myself, let's wait this out six months, if it hasn't happened yet, we got to get you back on to figure out what's happening. It's been six months, is the recession that everybody's predicting still coming?

Lakshman:     Yeah, I think so if in fact, it's not already here. It's, it's unusual for everybody to see a recession when it's starting. That would be really weird. Typically, people recognize recessions in the rearview mirror, ourselves included, because the indicators that define recession, output, employment, income, and sales, those all undergo a great deal of revision in the vicinity of recessions. And those revisions occur well after the fact. So you can have an instance where you're inside of a recession. And you've never seen, for example, a negative GDP, or a negative jobs growth. In the last recession, the Great Recession of 07-09, the first time we saw a negative GDP number....

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