The wailing and gnashing of teeth over inflation and recession and uncertainty is coming to an end. Inflation has become stubbornly persistent, but it seems to have turned the corner and is lower than last year. The potential for recession — at least a severe one — has faded. And uncertainty has simply become a fact of life. As such, 2024 is shaping up to be a year of transition from impatience (waiting for the economy to turn around) to grudging acceptance (that low interest rates are a thing of the past, consumer and worker shifts are here to stay).
Waiting for the perfect time to invest means you won’t be investing at all.
YEAR OF MAKING DUE
At this time in 2022, you would have been hard pressed to find an economist who wasn’t seeing a recession on the horizon as the Fed continued to raise rates. The only questions anyone was asking focused on the severity of the expected recession and where interest rates would peak. Today, practitioners of the dismal science are sounding relatively optimistic on the U.S. economy going into 2024. Positively giddy would be stretching it, but they are certainly seeing more positive than negative signals as we approach a new year.
Most of the economists who participated in The Wall Street Journal’s fall survey believe there is less than a 50 percent chance of the United States falling into a 2024 recession.
