Investing.com: Hard Landing, Soft Landing, or Goldilocks? Clues From Preliminary Earnings Reports

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Excerpt:

  • Recent economic data suggests the domestic economy could skirt a recession
  • Robust jobs numbers, declining inflation trends, and hope that earnings hang in there are areas the bulls point out
  • Some firms, though, have issued cautionary profit outlooks

What’s the state of the consumer? Struggling amid still-high inflation and dwindling pandemic-related excess savings?

Thriving in a bountiful jobs market that features improving real wages and the lowest unemployment rate since 1969? It seems there’s data to go either way at this point as recession fears ease. Both the December payrolls report and CPI reading suggest that a goldilocks economic outcome might not be so farfetched. Of course, the x-factor is Chair Powell and the rest of the Federal Reserve.