"Why Are Economists So Bad at Forecasting Recessions?"
April 08, 2019
Easy: macro is hard.
A recent working paper by Zidong An, Joao Tovar Jalles, and Prakash Loungani discovered that of 153 recessions in 63 countries from 1992 to 2014, only five were predicted by a consensus of private-sector economists in April of the preceding year. And the economists tended to underestimate the magnitude of the slump until the year was almost over.
Remember: "There’s only one reliable rule of thumb in macro".