Labor/Employment

Forecasters see good chances the U.S. economy will continue to grow steadily in 2025, while the odds of a downturn have diminished in recent months, Investopedia reported. The U.S. economy has expanded every year since the pandemic struck, and forecasters expect that growth will continue, albeit slower than in recent years. The Gross Domestic Product, a widely used measure of the economy’s entire output by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, will likely grow at an annual rate of 1.9% in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to a November survey of economists by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The same economists foresaw a 22.4% chance of a quarter of negative growth by the third quarter of 2025, down from 25% who said the same in the previous round of the quarterly survey. Solid consumer spending and a resilient labor will continue to prop up the economy in the coming year, economists at Goldman Sachs said in a year-ahead forecast in November. Experts are growing increasingly confident the U.S. will pull off the historically rare “soft landing” from the burst of high inflation that strained household budgets as the country re-opened from the pandemic. The Federal Reserve’s campaign of interest rate hikes starting in 2022 was meant to cool inflation by raising all kinds of borrowing costs, at the risk of sending the economy into a tailspin and causing a wave of layoffs. In 2022 and 2023, many economists predicted a recession was on the horizon, as usually happens after a cycle of inflation and anti-inflation rate hikes. Instead, inflation has cooled almost back to pre-pandemic levels while the job market has stayed resilient. The economy has continued to grow to the point that the Fed has begun to lower rates again.