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There's nothing magic about the yield curve – bond investors operate off the same information as the rest of us, so it's a gauge of optimism/pessimism rather than something that might actually cause a recession. But damn, it's striking 1/ 
Every modern recession has been preceded by a yield curve inversion; every modern inversion has been followed by a recession. So this is pretty striking. And it's actually even more striking given that short-term rates are low 2/
Basically, short rates can only fall so much, while they can rise without limit. So there's an upward bias to the spread between long rates, which reflect expected future short rates, compared with short rates; not as much as there used to be, but still 3/ krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/the…
The thing is, there's no one obvious cause for this pessimism. The trade war doesn't look big enough; it seems like a bunch of things adding up to global worries of a smorgasbord recession. Don't know how seriously to take it 4/ nytimes.com/2018/09/19/opi…
