system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How likely is it that the US goes into a recession in 2020?
gpt
Unfortunately, this is not a question that has any good answers. This is because forecasting recessions is very difficult. If anybody does have a recession forecasting model with a track record of successful predictions, it is a fairly well kept secret. Even if it does exist somewhere, its owners would likely be quite stressed about whether it will keep working in the future. While people sometimes point to as indicators various events that tend to occur soon before recessions occur as well, it is hard to be sure that those past relationships will hold up. 

The reasons behind these forecasting difficulties can be fairly deep. Put simply, one of the main reasons for these difficulties is that recessions tend to result from surprise events, with the *surprise* part tending to matter quite a bit. Why is this the case? Well, people tend to respond to problems that they can clearly foresee. If businesses foresee that some area of the economy is likely to be troubled, you can expect that many businesses will avoid that area unless they are quite confident in their own stability and their ability to ride out any problems. If the government (be that the Federal Reserve or some other agency) foresees a problem, they might take action to either head off the issue or at least put plans in place to deal with the aftermath. For surprise problems, however, none of this occurs and so you might catch everyone with their pants down. Businesses wrapped up in problem areas that weren't prepared to deal with things going bottoms up might themselves start to fail, causing problems for other businesses dealing with them and for their employees. This can cause the problem to cascade across the economy and perhaps cause a broader panic, which is not likely to be helped by people seeing the government caught unawares by the problem as well. Given the above and the importance of the problem sparking the recession coming as a surprise, this yields a big problem for would-be recession forecasters. You must be able to (a) forecast a surprise that most other people have failed to forecast, and (b) forecast that surprise with sufficiently little credibility of your own that you do not spoil the surprise, so to speak, by persuading everyone else that it is a real problem.

I should note that the above is just one example of the issues faced and does not necessarily capture all cases. It is not the case that recessions can only be caused by surprise events. For example, it would not be particularly surprising to hear that a country fell into recession because of a total oil embargo, even though the embargo was announced a few months before taking effect. Nonetheless, it seems nobody is particularly good at figuring out which non-surprise events are sure to cause recessions or when those non-surprise events are themselves likely to occur. At any rate, a fair bottom line conclusion would simply be this: forecasting recessions is hard, likely nobody does a very good job of it, and if someone is doing a good job of it you probably would have no way to either (a) get their forecasts (they might be industrial secrets), or (b) verify that their forecasts actually are the good ones.