The “most anticipated recession ever” never materialized this past year, with the US economy instead achieving a soft landing.
The pace of expansion appears likely to stay buoyant in 2025 as the economy rides the tailwinds of both a fiscal impulse, courtesy of Donald Trump’s election win and a Republican sweep of Congress, and a monetary impulse from the Federal Reserve’s pivot to a rate-cutting cycle.
Over the past several years, the US economy’s resilience has distinguished it from other developed economies. A key question for investors is whether this trend can continue, as stronger economic gains have translated into healthy corporate profits and outsize stock market gains. Our starting point for such analysis continues to be the ClearBridge Recession Risk Dashboard, our north star when thinking about the health of the US economy. Fortunately, the dashboard’s overall signal is currently in green/expansionary territory, and it has been consistently improving over the course of 2024 (Exhibit 1).
We believe there have been four key components of exceptional relative US economic growth over the past few years: the strength of the US consumer, productivity gains, growing labor supply and a solid fiscal impulse. Looking ahead, three of these are likely to remain intact in 2025, while the fourth, growing labor supply, should be less of a benefit, but not so much less that it could derail the US economy.
The US consumer has been a source of strength, initially powered by accumulated savings and generous government transfer payments during the pandemic. As these funds waned, a strong labor market fueled further upside as wage gains and broad job creation helped boost labor income, the largest single source of spending power for most Americans and closely tied to aggregate consumption trends. These trends appear largely intact as the calendar approaches 2025, with average hourly earnings holding up at a healthy growth rate of 4.0% year over year in October versus 4.3% coming into the year, for example.1
Exhibit 1: ClearBridge Recession Risk Dashboard
Source: ClearBridge Investments
Sticky wage gains have been a source of concern. Some worry that corporate profit margins will be crimped as businesses have to pay their workers more. We take a different view, however, believing that wages relative to a worker’s output (unit labor costs) are actually the key for profit margins. This is an important distinction because productivity gains (a worker’s output) have been robust over the past several quarters, returning to levels consistent with the 1950-2009 average as opposed to the post-global financial crisis experience. Looking ahead, we believe productivity will remain healthy given lower levels of job churn; if workers are changing jobs less frequently, these employees are more experienced, typically more tenured and more productive.
Exhibit 2: Productivity is Back
Past performance is not an indicator or a guarantee of future results.
Lower labor churn also means that the pace of hiring should be slower, all else being equal. This means that the labor market may look less healthy than it has and raises a risk to continued US exceptionalism if the strong domestic labor market cools. In fact, our primary worry on this front is less about workers staying in their roles longer and more about declining immigration, which has been a source of economic strength in recent years. Already the pace of immigration has slowed since President Biden’s executive actions to secure the boarder were issued in June. President-elect Trump is expected to take actions to further slow the pace of immigration into the United States, which should further cool the pace of job creation and weigh on economic growth at the margin in 2025.
On the positive side, the future Trump administration appears likely to deploy stimulus in the form of individual tax cuts, which should increase the fiscal impulse and help fuel economic growth. Fiscal stimulus has been a strong component of US economic growth in recent years on the back of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act.
While the fiscal impulse has begun to wane with little incremental government spending anticipated, Trump’s election and the Republican sweep open the door to using the budget reconciliation process to enact tax cuts, meaning the outlook for the fiscal impulse heading into 2025 should be positive for economic growth.
Putting all this together, we believe the US economy will remain healthy in 2025 with the potential for upside to the 2.0% consensus estimate for GDP growth.2
Sources:
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), October 2024.
- S&P Global, Economic Research: Global Economic Outlook Q1 2025. There is no assurance that any estimate, forecast or projection will be realized.
Definitions:
The ClearBridge Recession Risk Dashboard is a group of 12 indicators that examine the health of the US economy and the likelihood of a downturn.
The Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law by US President Joe Biden on August 16, 2022. The Act aims to curb inflation by reducing the deficit, lowering prescription drug prices, and investing in domestic energy production while promoting clean energy.
The CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS Act) is a US federal statute enacted by the 117th United States Congress and signed into law by current US President Joe Biden on August 9, 2022. The act provides roughly US$280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States.
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