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Recession LedgerThe long downturn, dated and checked

Subject

Economic predictions

The recession calls, year by year, and how each came out.

Every forecast on this site is kept with its date and checked at the foot of the page. The calls made here were early more often than they were wrong, and wrong more often than the people making them admitted at the time; both are on the record.

Read them in order and a pattern appears: the direction was usually right, the timing was usually early, and the thing that intervened was usually the central bank.

A hand with a pen points at the peak of a line on a printed market chart

2022

  1. An apocalypse upon us: how much more can one summer take?

    Any three of these would have made a bad year. In July 2022 they were all on the same page of the newspaper.

  2. US economy crashes into recession: the first-quarter 2022 GDP report

    Two days earlier the most bearish bank on Wall Street had given a recession a one-in-three chance a year out. Then the number came in.

  3. Seeing it all come together: bonds, the yield curve and the end of the Fed's taper

    For two years the Fed was the whale in the bond pool. On 9 March 2022 it climbed out, and the water level did what water levels do.

  4. The next recession is here: reading the fourth-quarter 2021 GDP report under the hood

    You cannot see the intruder, and you do not think he is in the house yet. But you can smell the cigarette smoke through the bedroom window.

2019

  1. Bond primer: does an inverted yield curve indicate a recession?

    Correlation is not causation, said the former Fed chair. When the same thing follows the same action every time for forty-five years, the distinction wears thin.

2017

  1. A list of seven troubles assailing the US economy heading into summer 2017

    This is not a list of things that might go wrong. It is a list of things that were going wrong, with the dates.

  2. The inevitability of economic collapse: the flaws that were not fixed after 2008

    Trends determine ends. Nothing on this list had been fixed, little was being attempted, and the new administration proposed to loosen what restraints there were.

2016

  1. This graph says it all: the 2016 recession was already here

    Twelve per cent growth after the war, eight per cent for thirty years, four after that, and now a recovery that could not reach three. The line only goes one way.

  2. 2016 economic predictions: the year of the Epocalypse

    A word was needed for economic, epoch, collapse and apocalypse at once. The year was expected to earn it.