Last month, a post titled “U.S. Recession Probabilities September 2021: 44% (stlouisfed.org)” generated some good discussion on Hacker News [1]. It now being December, I thought it would be interesting to check the updated forecast [2]. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the probability had plummeted. But furthermore, it was very interesting to see that the retroactive probabilities in September had dropped below 3%. I know many of you are interested in analyzing time series, and thought this was an interesting case study on the role of smoothing!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29075378

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RECPROUSM156N