In October 2022, Bloomberg News published a report with a memorable headline: “Forecast for US Recession Within Year Hits 100% in Blow to Biden.” According to the projections from the Bloomberg Economics model, it was “effectively certain” that the United States’ economy would slip into a recession in 2023.
That’s not even close to what actually happened. NBC News reported:
The economy grew at a much more rapid pace than expected in the final three months of 2023, as the U.S. easily skirted a recession that many forecasters had thought was inevitable, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Gross domestic product, a measure of all the goods and services produced, increased at a 3.3% annualized rate in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to data adjusted seasonally and for inflation.
Before the Commerce Department’s report was released, the expectations were that we’d see 2% growth in the fourth quarter. Clearly, the resilient economy topped that figure.
As for the calendar year, the U.S. economy grew at a 2.5% pace in 2023 — easily outpacing expectations and the 1.9% growth Americans saw a year earlier.
The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, taking stock of the data, concluded that President Joe Biden “couldn’t have asked for better numbers.”
Evidently, the White House agreed. In a written statement, the Democratic president celebrated the combination of strong GDP growth, robust job creation, and “core inflation moving back down towards the pre-pandemic benchmark,” adding, “As a result, wages, wealth, and employment are higher now than they were before the pandemic. That’s good news for American families and American workers. That is three years in a row of growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up on my watch.” As for the political implications, in 2019 — the year before Covid and the 2020 recession — Donald Trump told the public that he was responsible for creating the greatest economy in the history of the planet. GDP growth that year was 2.5%. Four years later, the former president insisted that the economy was abysmal, and yet, GDP growth in 2023 was also 2.5% — the exact same growth rate the United States saw when Trump thought the economy was amazing. As best as I can tell, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee hasn’t commented on the latest economic data, though I’ll gladly update this post if he has something to contribute.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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