When Wall Street consensus in early 2023 was that a recession was set to hit the US economy in short order, Neil Dutta wasn’t convinced.
The data to support such an outcome just wasn’t there, the head of economics at Renaissance Macro Research argued in a July 2023 piece for Business Insider. Despite an onslaught of Federal Reserve rate hikes, continuing unemployment claims were low, monthly jobs reports were robust, and layoffs were muted, he wrote at the time.
About a year later, Dutta has changed his tune. In a July 11 article for BI, he wrote that the Fed should “hurry up and cut” to avoid a surge in unemployment that would throw the economy into recession.
Just weeks later, investors had a rude awakening that a recession could come to fruition when the July employment data sent the stock market into chaos in early August. Jobs gains had come in lower than expected, and the unemployment rate …