The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has just released its latest Survey of Professional Forecasters. No real surprise; the prior survey was taken just before the financial crisis hit hard. The new consensus forecast is pretty close to my forecast:
I always take a the revision direction as a separate piece of economic data. So in addition to knowing that the consensus is gloomy, the fact that it was revised down from last quarter is another piece of bad news.
However, the mood of the country seems to be that the world is coming to an end. It's not. The consensus anticipates a spring recovery, as do I. We can argue a bit about the timing, and a bit about the magnitude of the decline, but there really is no disputing that the economy will recover from this recession.