Businesses see lower odds U.S. is in or entering recession 

People line up outside a Kentucky Career Center hoping to find assistance with their unemployment claim in Frankfort, Kentucky, U.S. June 18, 2020. REUTERS/Bryan Woolston

The likelihood that the United States is already in recession or will fall into one this year has dropped over the past three months to 56% from a nearly two-thirds possibility, according to a survey on business conditions released on Monday.

Approximately 53% of those polled by the National Association of Business Economics (NABE) said they had a more than-even expectation the United States would enter a recession over the next 12 months, while 3% indicated they thought the country was already in one.

In the NABE’s previous poll released in October, 64% of respondents indicated that the U.S. economy was either already in a recession or had a more-than-even likelihood of entering one in the next 12 months.

A total of 60 NABE members who work for private-sector firms or industry trade associations responded to the latest survey, which was conducted from Jan. 4-11.

The poll also showed respondents expected inflation to ease within their companies and industries, with a forward-looking gauge for prices charged falling by 10 percentage points since the last survey to the lowest reading since October 2020.

The Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point at its Jan. 31-Feb. 1 policy meeting as it nears a stopping point in its hiking cycle now that high inflation is on the wane.

The U.S. central bank raised rates last year at the fastest pace since the early 1980s in a bid to quell inflation that was running at 40-year highs. Inflation, based on the Fed’s preferred measure, is still nearly three times the central bank’s 2% target.

Recent economic data has shown inflation continuing to ebb and consumer and producer prices, profits, and wages all growing more slowly, raising hopes that inflation can be brought to heel without causing a recession