median in a survey of professional forecasters, but some still think it’s possible).this is an interesting picture The latest survey of professional forecasters and gross domestic product.
figure 1: GDP (bold black), May Professional Forecaster Survey median (blue), February SPF median (tan), May 17 GDPNow (sky blue), and underlying GDP (gray). Sources: BEA 2023Q1 advance, CBO (February 2023), Philadelphia Fed, Atlanta Fed, and authors’ calculations.
The median response suggests that growth will not decline until the fourth quarter of 2023. Growth, on the other hand, was weak — less than 1% (q/q SAAR) in Q2, about half a percentage point in Q3, and essentially no growth in Q4. So the downward trend shifted from the third quarter to the fourth quarter. (If you look at the November survey, median growth in the first quarter was essentially zero.)
This latest outlook stands in stark contrast to Torsten Slok’s narrative of the consensus, which he described as a “hard landing”.
source: T. Slok, May 16, 2023. (not online).
In my opinion, this shows that different groups of economists are expressing different views on the outlook (timing may also matter – here it may be a few weeks difference).
By the way, I’ve always stayed away from the word “recession” because negative GDP growth doesn’t necessarily equate to a recession.
