Economists often discern phantom recessions — downturns that never materialize in the real world. One of those hovered in the ether until last month, the recession of 2011 and 2012. Happily, it never happened, and we were all spared a great deal of pain.
But until this month, the Economic Cycle Research Institute — a small Manhattan think tank that once had an unblemished track record in the brutal sport of economic forecasting — was on the record as declaring that this phantom recession actually took place.
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