‘Hard landing’ might still look over economy

Is 2024 the year America gets the recession economists expected in 2023? It’s a growing concern. A “worse-than-expected” jobs report this month could signal an economic slowdown that “threatens to downshift the nation’s brisk economic growth,” said The Associated Press. The economy added just 175,000 new jobs in April — “well short” of expectations — following reports that America’s overall economic output “slowed dramatically at the outset of 2024.”

The “hard landing” that economists predicted last year never materialized. Current expectations for a “soft landing” for the economy “could be wrong too,” Fortune said. Surveys show companies are pulling back on hiring and workers are increasingly worried about keeping their jobs, Citi chief U.S. economist Andrew Hollenhorst told Bloomberg TV. The good news? That could lead the Federal Reserve to start aggressively cutting interest rates. “I think the Fed’s going to see enough to cut,” Hollenhorst said, “because we’re more toward the hard landing end of the spectrum.”