In 2022, economists predicted a severe recession. By early 2023, the outlook reversed: energy prices fell, consumers kept spending, and GDP growth hit 2.6% and 2.9% in the final quarters, defying forecasts of near-zero growth.
Lately, it's been a lot better news than we thought we were going to see at this point. And if you went back to 2022, everybody was lining up to say it's going to be an awful recession. Now all of a sudden everybody is reversing course. The Europeans have now announced that we're not going to go into recession. We have seen an improvement in energy pricing. Consumers are still spending. We have begun to really see all of the big think tanks saying maybe slowdown, but we're probably not heading into a full-blown recession. Even at the end of last year, we started to see numbers surprisingly high. We had predicted, we being economists and we're so good at predicting, we thought that the third quarter would be very anemic, no more than about 0.5% growth. Fourth quarter was going to be just as bad. And then we actually got the numbers and third quarter grew at 2.6% and fourth quarter grew at 2.9%.
