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Agreed. There are an unlimited number of variables that cannot all be accounted for, and even the most insignificant of them have the ability impact the future in dramatic ways. There is absolutely no saying what the likelihood of a recession is.

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There is absolutely no saying what the likelihood of a recession is.

Agreed, unlike every other random event that exists in the universe, recessions are the one thing whose likelyhood cannot possibly be expressed.

Problem here is it's not a repeatable experiment. The sample size is 1 world economy.

This is a fair comment and I'm not sure why you were downvoted. However it is not a single random event either. A continuous random process with memory would probably be the most appropriate model, and this would be what Vanguard and others use to make estimations of likelihood.

Both of you seem to be confusing estimating the likelihood of a random event with predicting the event’a occurrence. These are not remotely the same.

No, it’s the downvoters who are confused. :-)

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