I have been in the economic forecasting business for close to 50 years. I got my start in the early 1970s, on the research staff at the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC, before taking my crystal ball to Wall Street for over 30 years. For more than a decade, it has been the ivory tower at Yale - still dabbling in forecasting from time to time but mainly teaching, writing, and speaking.

Over that long stretch, my forecasting record has been mixed. There were a couple of memorable calls at the Fed, where I warned of a sharp recession in the mid-1970s and intractable inflation later in the decade. But I lo...