We Are Being Told The Odds Of A Recession Are Rising As Economic Conditions Deteriorate All Around Us

by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:

Is the U.S. economy headed for a recession? Nobody can deny that consumer confidence is plummeting, home sales are way down, mass layoffs are being conducted all over the nation, thousands of stores are closing, and a global trade war has erupted. Meanwhile, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model is currently projecting that the U.S. economy will shrink at an annualized rate of 1.8 percent during the first quarter of 2025. Needless to say, none of these are good signs.Recession survival guides

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In recent weeks, the corporate media has been running lots of stories about how the odds of a recession are suddenly surging.  Here is one example from NBC News…

Trade tensions have torn into the markets. With stocks sliding into correction territory in the last week, a question emerges: Is a recession next?

Traders on prediction markets — where people wager on such events as the likelihood of a recession — are increasingly betting on an economic downturn. Polymarket, for example, currently places the odds on a recession in 2025 at 40% — a sharp jump of nearly 20 percentage points in under a month.

That is quite alarming.

And earlier today, it was being reported that a Deutsche Bank survey of 400 experts found that nearly half of them now believe that “the U.S. is heading for a recession”…

Chances that the U.S. is heading for a recession are close to 50-50, according to a Deutsche Bank survey that raises more questions about the direction of the U.S. economy.

The probability of a downturn in growth over the next 12 months is about 43%, as set by the average view of 400 respondents during the period of March 17-20.

I haven’t seen this much chatter about a potential recession in a long time, and a lot of people out there are really scared.

In an attempt to help some of those frightened people, USA Today just posted an article with advice about how to prepare for a recession…

If the United States is about to enter a recession, as some economists fear, it will be one of the most widely anticipated downturns in recent memory.

Americans have had lots of time to prepare. But are we ready?

Personally, I like to look at the cold, hard numbers to determine whether a recession is coming or not.

And what the cold, hard numbers are telling us right now is extremely alarming.

Normally tax revenue declines significantly when an economic downturn is upon us, and according to the Washington Post it appears that federal tax revenue in 2025 will be down by about 10 percent compared to last year…

Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.

Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.

“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.

In a season that is full of red flags for the economy, this may be the biggest red flag of them all.

Another really bad sign is that consumer sentiment just plunged to a 29 month low…

Consumer sentiment in the U.S. fell for the third consecutive month in March, now down 22% from December 2024 before President Donald Trump took office, a new survey found.

The University of Michigan survey showed consumer sentiment fell to 57.9 this month, a 29-month low. The index showed participants’ expectations for the future of their personal finances and the stock market had deteriorated. It also showed that Americans are expecting inflation to get worse, not better, during a time when many are worried tariffs will raise prices at the checkout aisle.

Economic conditions have not been good for a long time.

So it is quite disturbing to see that so many Americans expect things to get even worse.

One recent survey found that the percentage of Americans that believe that the economy is getting worse is more than twice as high as the percentage of Americans that believe that the economy is getting better…

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