This research was published on March 20, 2026

When new risks to the economy emerge, the editors at Harvard Business Review often ask us to comment. With war raging in the Gulf, HBR today published our take on U.S. recession risk — the question they have put to us most frequently over the past few years (click here to see the past 20 articles we have done with HBR). These articles offer less technical, more conversational access to our work—more prose, less charts.

In the new HBR piece you may recognize many of the themes and arguments from last week’s edition of The Macroscope. To dig a little deeper on cycle risk, we’ve added a distinction between a sequence of shocks vs. a confluence of shocks. Our non-recessionary cyclical coverage of the past few years has held up well in part because we correctly judged that the sequential nature of digestible headwinds would allow the economy to cling on.