> and yet the post-2009 economic expansion is the longest ever, and this is in spite of all the anxieties over tariffs and trade wards and the fed raising rates.

A crisis is not an economic fact that magically happens when some predetermined values for some set of indicators are reached.

A crisis is a mix of two things: 1) a big financial/economic issue that affects an important sector of the economy, 2) widespread panic.

There are already multiple candidates for 1), but what hasn't happened is 2).

Why? That's anybody's guess.

My guess is Trump.

For people to panic, there needs to be sustained media coverage and focus. But now whatever Trump says is more important than anything else for the media.

If you look at the media since Trump became president, the most important issues have been all stuff related to his government, and whenever the media has focused on anything for too long, he's come out with some other thing that the media shifts their attention to.

So we've had lots of small panics, which by now have mostly desensitized the public.

If someone like Trump can continuously interrupt the media, they effectively control it through disruption, and then the media cannot focus for long enough on anything for people to fully panic and cause a full blown crisis.