Betsey Stevenson, Columnist

2024’s Economy Will Be Just as Unpredictable as 2023’s

Regardless of whether the US has a recession this year, the current state of the economy is reason to celebrate.

January 3, 2024 at 11:30 AM UTC

Betsey Stevenson is a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. She was on the president’s Council of Economic Advisers and was chief economist at the US Department of Labor.

Reasons to celebrate.
Photographer: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images North America

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Recessions are notoriously difficult to predict. At the end of 2019, for example, many pundits were forecasting a recession simply because the boom had gone on for so long. But economic booms don’t die of old age, they get murdered by an unexpected event — like a pandemic. So those 2019 forecasts were right, but for the wrong reason.

Will there be a recession this year? My only prediction is this: No one will get it right for the right reasons. That’s because the answer depends on the unknown. Will global conflict escalate? Will there be another pandemic? Will oil prices skyrocket? Will a natural disaster clog up supply chains or wipe out valuable capital?