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Goldman Sachs Doesn't Share Wall Street Fears of 2020 Recession

Goldman Sachs Group economists are proving more relaxed than Wall Street rivals.

Goldman Sachs Doesn't Share Wall Street Fears of 2020 Recession
A television screen displays news about the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching 26,000 while traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S. (Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists are proving more relaxed than Wall Street rivals about the risks of a U.S. recession come 2020.

While Bridgewater Associates Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are starting to fret that tighter fiscal and monetary policies will create problems for the world’s biggest economy in two years’ time, Goldman Sachs sees just a 36 percent chance of recession over the next three years. That risk is below the historical average.

“There has been increasing investor interest in the chance of a recession in the U.S. over the next few years,” Goldman Sachs economists led by Jan Hatzius said in a report published on Sunday. “Our model paints a more benign picture.”

They reckon growth will stay robust and are less worried than they were that financial conditions had become unsustainably easy.

Still, they noted that the U.S. still has the power to pull down other economies. If America is in a recession, the chance other developed economies will suffer the same fate over the subsequent year is almost 70 percent, according to Goldman Sachs’s analysis of four decades of data.

“Historical experience suggests that recessions in the U.S. have gone hand in hand with recessions elsewhere,” Hatzius’s team said. “But even though the U.S. cycle matters for other economies, we remain sanguine about the outlook.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Simon Kennedy in London at skennedy4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stephanie Flanders at flanders@bloomberg.net, Malcolm Scott, Karl Lester M. Yap

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.