There are two basic ways to wrestle with recession risk. One is to forecast it, the other is to develop a high-confidence assessment of whether it’s stepping on the business cycle’s throat based on the data published so far. The world is awash with the former, and it comes with all the usual caveats, including a fair amount of error. That’s the nature of forecasting: accuracy is all over the place, and it’s up to the consumers of the outlooks to figure out who has the better prediction methodology. By contrast, calling the start of major downturns in the economy in the here and now, by using what we know rather than what we think will happen, is far less precarious (if the process is designed reasonably well).