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Let’s start with the good news: It could’ve been worse — a lot worse.

When the markets opened on Wall Street this morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1,103 points, or nearly 3%. But in Tokyo, the Nikkei average began down 6% and proceeded to fall further, ending the day down 12% and thereby marking its worst day since the crash of Black Monday in 1987. So, again, it could’ve been worse.

These bad tidings come courtesy of Bidenomics, which has so far printed some $7 trillion in money we don’t have. This inflation-inducing profligacy, coupled with Friday’s awful jobs report and the Federal Reserve’s decision last week not to cut interest rates, has spurred fears of a recession.

And rightly so. Just in time to make Kamala Harris account for it. The New York Post’s Charlie Gasparino wonders, “Could an economic ‘Black Swan’ of a recession upend the November election?”

When Gasparino refers to a black swan, he’s referring to an event that author, mathematician, and stock trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes in his eponymously titled book. According to Taleb, a black swan is first and foremost an outlier — one whose occurrence is outside the realm of our expectations. Second, its impact is extreme. And third, its occurrence is followed by explanations that we humans concoct with certitude after the fact.

Indeed, we can hear the Harris team now: Our policies rescued the American people from Donald Trump’s recession, so Republicans should spare us their fearmongering about a recession.

But to those who prattle on about “the Trump recession,” a bit of intellectual honesty is in order. Yes, the American economy went into recession under Trump, but it was entirely driven by the COVID-19 calamity — the global fear, the once-in-a-century death toll, the economic uncertainty, the subsequent lockdowns and layoffs and job losses, all of it. The other part of the Trump recession that must be noted is that our nation’s recovery from it was the fastest in history.

As for what lies ahead, Gasparino says none of it is good for the Biden/Harris regime or for the Harris campaign. He writes:

Even before Friday’s shockingly worrisome jobs report (unemployment ticking up to 4.3%, a slowdown in hiring followed by a 610-point drop in the Dow) that’s what some savvy market analysts and economists told me could be happening.

They see some weird stuff in the economic data that hasn’t been factored into the recent Dow and the Nasdaq run-ups to record territory. Given the supreme importance of the economy to voters, it could turn a neck-and-neck race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris strongly in favor of Trump. It’s Harris and her boss, Sleepy Joe Biden, whose policies created this possible mess.

Things are messy alright, and not just economically. As Florida Republican Congressman Mike Waltz put it on Fox News this morning: “People know what worked, for their wallet, what worked for their family’s safety, and worked for world peace. And that was President Trump’s leadership and his policies, and that is all we should be talking about from now until November.”

Waltz is right. Polling consistently shows the economy to be number one among voters’ concerns. And economic issues don’t bode well for Harris. A recent ABC News poll is emblematic: “Trump leads Biden by 10 points in trust to handle the economy, 11 points on inflation.”

Put more subtly and succinctly this morning by Donald Trump himself: “TRUMP CASH vs. KAMALA CRASH!”

If we do slide into a recession, though, we can be sure that the mainstream media will do its best to inoculate Harris as not responsible for the ruinous economic policies of her boss. And we can be sure that Google will lie through the teeth about its corrupt search engine, which will likely take a simple search query like “recession” and spit out results for the aforementioned “Trump recession” while ignoring the current administration’s destructiveness.

As for his black-swan assessment, Gasparino says such a downturn, if it comes, would be unexpected based on lazy high-level readings of the economic data, whose headline metrics — such as a strong stock market and low unemployment — appear to be sound on their face. (Remember: Joe Biden’s “strong” record on stocks and jobs is due largely to having come into office at the height of the Trump recovery and simply riding its coattails before his policies got around to wrecking things.)

To that point: “I’m not sure that labor market was ever sustainable,” said economist Nick Bunker. “It was built on the back of a huge Covid shock. It was amazing to see but it was never going to stick around long.”

Are we there yet? No, not exactly. But, as National Review’s Dominic Pino reports, “The July jobs report triggered the Sahm rule, named for former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm, which is a recession indicator. The Sahm rule says that a recession is beginning when the three-month average of the unemployment rate is 0.5 percentage points greater than the twelve-month low point. Now we know that the average of May, June, and July is 0.53 percentage points greater than the twelve-month low point.”

Beyond the politics, none of this is good news for the American people, who feel the effects of Bidenomics most acutely. But inasmuch as some brief economic pain might help remind voters what’s at stake, and might thereby usher in an economically friendlier Trump administration, maybe a spoonful of castor oil is just what the doctor ordered.