Inflation’s choppy ride over the past two years has left economists feeling modest about their forecasting abilities, but optimistic about a soft landing in the US and eventually a Fed rate cut.
At the economics profession’s three-day annual meeting that concluded in San Antonio on Sunday, many participants acknowledged the difficulties they had in forecasting the outlook for the economy and inflation in a post-pandemic world. Many failed to expect inflation to rise to multi-decade highs, and then mistakenly believed that it would take a recession to bring it down again.