Happy Sunday, I’m Bill Cohan.

Welcome back to Dry Powder, my biweekly email about what’s really happening on Wall Street. Thanks to all the new members who have recently joined the community. If you have a friend or colleague who might be interested in receiving these notes, feel free to share the sign up link with them. (We also have group subscriptions.)

In today’s email, a few thoughts on the current non-recession recession, the Fed’s next moves, and how the White House is trying to spin the bad news. Plus my analysis of the Twitter-Elon standoff, a potential settlement, and why a ruling from the Chancery Court is likely only the beginning of the negotiations.

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The White House is supposedly sweating next week’s G.D.P. data, as well they should, but does it really matter if we’re in an official recession, or not? I don’t think so. If inflation is raging along at 9 percent annually and G.D.P. is in decline, the question is what will the American people actually feel? Higher prices for nearly everything or some amorphous sense that our gross domestic product has fallen two quarters in a row? Hence the Biden administration’s new talking points, previewed in this White House blog post, that notes “there are no fixed rules” for determining a recession.

What will be far more telling than a secular decline in G.D.P. will be rising unemployment, job cuts at big tech companies or at Wall Street banks, and a general sense that it will be increasingly more difficult to find a job and to avoid being laid off from a job you have. New filings for unemployment claims last week were the highest since November, although not much ink was spilled about this turn of events. As Harry Truman once said, or is said to have said, “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.” So, it seems to me, we’re much closer to the...