Goldman Sachs Group economists are proving more relaxed than Wall Street rivals about the risks of a U.S. recession come 2020.
While Bridgewater Associates and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) are starting to fret that tighter fiscal and monetary policies will create problems for the world’s biggest economy in two years’ time, Goldman Sachs (GS) sees just a 36% chance of recession over the next three years. That risk is below the historical average.
“There has been increasing investor interest in the chance of a recession in the U.S. over the next few years,” Goldman Sachs economists led by Jan Hatzius said in a report published on Sunday. “Our model paints a more benign picture.”
They reckon growth will stay robust and are less worried than they were that financial conditions had become unsustainably easy.
Still, they noted that the U.S. still has the power to pull down other economies. If America is in a recession, the chance other developed economies will suffer the same fate over the subsequent year is almost 70%, according to Goldman Sachs’s analysis of four decades of data.
“Historical experience suggests that recessions in the U.S. have gone hand in hand with recessions elsewhere,” Hatzius’s team said. “But even though the U.S. cycle matters for other economies, we remain sanguine about the outlook.”
