[ufhghfggf]

Historically the gold standard for predicting recession, more accurate than any other indicator, is "10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Minus 2-Year Treasury Constant Maturity (T10Y2Y)":

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y/

The gray bars are recessions and downward slopes precede recessions. At least all the way back 1976.

Has anything fundamentally changed that makes this no longer accurate?

EDIT: this comment has been downvoted with no explanation why. Perhaps the HN economist who downvoted me would be kind enough to teach us all the flaws of this predictor?

[blitzar]

Ultra low to negative interest rates and mass government bond buying. The 10 and 2 year interest rate have not been meaningfully set by the market since 2008.

It is still a red flag, but a well known enough red flag that the treasury and fed will change their issue / buying bond behaviours in order to maintain a positive slope.

[ufhghfggf]

Curiously it still "predicted" the early 2020 COVID recession gray bar, but it of course could not have predicted it before Wuhan's patient zero, so I guess it has a way of being sometimes lucky. (Or, if the chart truly is to be believed by its faithful, then the early 2020 recession would have happened even without COVID.)

[blitzar]

The 2020 covid recession started in q3 19 - markets were being propped up with extra liquidity, rate hikes by the fed were abandoned earlier in the year and they had started cutting rates again. If you are cutting interest rates that is not a healthy economy, and a late 2019 / 2020 downturn was pretty widely predicted before covid existed.

Without covid, and the truly massive global stimulus that was pumped in, we may have seen just as much downside in stocks without the rapid rebound and valuations half what they are now.

[Brian_K_White]

Curious myself.