Finance · Satire
WASHINGTON — A consortium of leading economists issued a joint advisory Monday warning that the United States appears to be entering its fourth consecutive unprecedented time, raising concerns that precedent may never resume.
The advisory, published by the National Bureau of Economic Vibes, notes that the current unprecedented period follows directly from the previous three, with no intervening stretch of precedented time in which citizens could catch their breath, rebuild savings, or remember what normal felt like.
'Historically, a once-in-a-generation event occurred once in a generation,' said lead author Dr. Raymond Okafor. 'That was the deal. That's what the name promised. Our data show we're now averaging 2.6 once-in-a-generation events per fiscal year. At this cadence, a child born today will experience 190 of them by retirement, assuming retirement, which is its own unprecedented question.'
The report catalogs the escalating language crisis facing professional forecasters, who have exhausted their vocabulary. 'Unprecedented' was worn smooth by 2021. 'Uncharted waters' followed. 'Perfect storm' has been used to describe fourteen distinct storms, several of them overlapping, which meteorologists note is not how perfect works. One major bank's research desk has quietly begun rating events on a scale of one to five 'yikes,' a methodology that critics call unserious and the bank calls 'no less predictive than the old one.'
Ordinary Americans have adapted in their own way, largely by ceasing to react. 'A guy at work told me the market did something that hasn't happened since 1929, and I just said cool and ate my sandwich,' reported Tampa resident Luis Herrera. 'What am I supposed to do with that information? I've been living through history nonstop since 2020. I'm tired of history. I'd like to live through a couple months of nothing. Nothing would be unprecedented at this point, actually. I'd read that headline.'
The advisory identifies a troubling secondary phenomenon researchers call 'precedent inflation,' in which events must be increasingly extreme to register as notable at all. A supply chain disruption that would have led newscasts in 2015 now competes for attention with three simultaneous banking curiosities, an unexplained commodity squeeze, and whatever the bond market is doing, which the report describes in a footnote as 'don't look.'
Not everyone views the trend negatively. A growing school of economists argues that if every time is unprecedented, then unprecedented is simply what time is now, and the economy should be re-benchmarked accordingly. 'We propose declaring the entire period from 2020 onward as the new precedent,' said Dr. Ingrid Vasquez of the reformist camp. 'Then everything currently happening becomes extremely precedented, confidence returns, and we can all move on. It's one weird trick, but monetary policy has been one weird trick since 2008, so.'
The report closes with a forecast, offered with the authors' now-standard confidence interval of 'who is to say': the coming year will contain between two and nine major surprises, at least one of which will be described by every outlet as a black swan despite twelve analysts having predicted it, and the swan, once arrived, will be declared unprecedented.
'Our models are clear on one thing,' Okafor concluded. 'The most likely thing to happen next is something that has never happened before. We are, at last, certain of our uncertainty. In this economy, that counts as guidance.'