Allison Schrager, Columnist

Yes, a Recession Is Still a Possibility

Predictions of a “soft landing” seem both premature and hard to square with some of the data.

July 13, 2023 at 10:00 AM UTC

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

Still a lot of hard work ahead.
Nathan Howard/Bloomberg

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Call me superstitious or contrarian — or maybe just a procrastinator — but I only started worrying about a recession last week. That was when one prominent commentator stated flatly that “there will be no recession in the next six months,” while the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago declared that the US was on a “golden path” to immaculate disinflation.

I can’t be the only person who thinks this feels like tempting fate, or at least another round of “Why Didn’t Economists See This Recession Coming?” headlines. More than that, however, these predictions seem both premature and hard to square with some of the data.