I’m not sure why, but the Iraq war is draining our economy, not stimulating it. Maybe because we have too much debt this time around? Maybe because in those other times, the stimulus of making aircraft and military vehicles provided a boost to an otherwise stagnant economy, or was a larger % of the economy? Maybe now we buy a lot of our military supplies from overseas so our war is boosting China (clothes for soldiers come from Asia?) It increased employment, and this time we’re already at full employment? I really don’t know. The housing-recession connection is highly regarded by economists though.

Here are 2 other predictors of recession: inverted yield curve (which we have), and auto sales decline 2% (every time this happened we followed with recession and it happened last month).