The Path to a Soft Landing Is Getting a Little Easier
It isn’t inevitable that policy makers will crash the economy in their efforts to bring down inflation, even though the task remains fiendishly difficult.
Wish the pilots luck.
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What are the chances of an economic soft landing? A month ago, I likened this to Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s heroic landing of a passenger jet on the Hudson River; possible, but very, very difficult. Since then, predictions of a hard or crash landing have proliferated, from people as distinguished in the financial world as Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co., who predicts an economic “hurricane”; Elon Musk of Tesla Inc. who has a “super bad feeling” about the economy; Larry Fink of BlackRock Inc., who sees “elevated inflation for years”; and John Waldron, president of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., who warns of an unprecedented “confluence of the number of shocks to the system.”