The really bad thing about predicting recessions is that it takes the Business Cycle Dating Committee over at the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) many, many months (if not years) to make that final determination – you won’t know whether your guess was good or bad until long after it has lost its relevancy. The Great Recession is widely believed to have ended about a year ago, but that may not be made official for quite some time – it took almost two years after the 2001 recession ended for the NBER to say it was so.
Of course, that doesn’t stop people from speculating about whether the U.S. economy is headed north or south and, based on this new poll at CNBC, it appears to be the latter.
Of course, just because people think we’ll have a recession, doesn’t mean we will, though, with the deficit-cutting mania sweeping the globe, the odds have surely increased recently.
If I had to guess, I’d say that we’ll have a big slowdown in growth (but no recession) that will spawn massive money printing from the Fed and we’ll create some new version of a Frankenstein economy (remember that phrase from about 2003 as the housing bubble was starting to expand rapidly?) replete with new and even more dangerous asset bubbles.
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