The Trump Boom Is Making It Harder to See the Next Recession
All of this may cause us to assume that the economy will expand forever — and lead us to forget
that recessions tend to come, on average, every five years (though lately, some have taken longer than that to develop).
The Conference Board, for example, in its compilation of the Consumer Confidence Index in the United States,
essentially asks respondents whether they think we are on the verge of a recession, or may even be in one.
The indexes routinely miss the major changes in spirit
that cause long-term economic phenomena like the reckless prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, a decade of high adventuresome spirit in business
President Trump is, after all, a public figure like no other,
and his unique — and polarizing — effect on mass psychology appears to be muddling the economic data even more than usual.
Since 1854, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the United States has had 33 recessions,
and it has already been 105 months since the last one.
Data from 1968 to 2017, supplied by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in its quarterly Survey of Professional Forecasters, shows
that while professional forecasters as a group have had some ability to assess the probability that G. D.P.
will decline a year from now — which is the average probability for a decline in one year given in all of the surveys since 1970.