Imagine you are in a car speeding down the road. An obstruction comes into view, and the passengers in the car yell, “Watch out!” The driver swerves and misses the obstruction, and everything turns out fine. Were the passengers being alarmist by yelling? Would the driver have averted a crash either way? Was the obstruction big enough to cause damage, or could the car have just driven over it without incident? We’ll never really know. All we know is that things worked out O.K. The car, in this metaphor, is the United States economy. The drivers are the Federal Reserve and the Trump administration. And the passengers are all the people — especially on Wall Street and in the news media — who were raising recession fears three months ago. At that time, some unusual swings in the market for United States Treasury bonds stirred a wave of economic pessimism. Three months later, things are looking a great deal better — and the odds of a recession, in the near term at least, appear more remote.
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