Economists predict US set for recession next year – FT

Almost 40 percent of the 49 respondents project the National Bureau of Economic Research — the arbiter of when recessions begin and end — will declare one in the first or second quarter of 2023.

A third believe that call will be delayed until the second half of next year.

Compared to February’s survey, more economists are now of the view that core inflation, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index, will exceed 3 percent by the end of 2023.

Of the June respondents, 12 percent thought that outcome was “very likely”, up from just 4 percent earlier this year. The share of economists surveyed who thought that level “unlikely” over the same time period has since nearly halved.

Jonathan Wright, an economist at Johns Hopkins University who helped to design the survey, said the notable pessimism around both inflation and growth has stagflationary undertones, although he noted the circumstances are far different than the 1970s, when the term embodied a “much nastier mix of high inflation and recession”.

Nearly 40 percent of the economists warned that the Fed would fail to control inflation if it only raised the federal funds rate to 2.8 percent by the end of the year.

Dean Croushore, who served as an economist at the Fed’s Philadelphia branch for 14 years, cautioned that the central bank may need to eventually raise rates to roughly 5 percent to contain a problem he believed was largely caused by the Fed waiting “far too long” to take action.