This column was originally published in Kyle Whitmire’s newsletter Alabamafication. You can subscribe for free here .

Nero is tuning his fiddle. Can you hear him?

America might be in a recession already. It’s impossible to tell officially, as the public officials who make those calls have been furloughed or fired. Nero canned the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after she delivered some bad news, and the government shutdown has sent everybody else home until further notice.

But private-sector sources tell us the American economy is in a bad way.

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This week, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a private firm that tracks such things, released a report showing job losses not seen since the depths of the pandemic and, before that, the Great Recession. So

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