this is an article from February of 2007 it highlights that the Federal Reserve chairman at the time Ben banki was projecting something called a soft Landing this is another one where the international monetary fund projected a similar outlook for the US economy and again another one from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Central Bankers left and right were talking about this soft Landing scenario this is a chart that shows us the number of stories that include this term soft Landing in news articles and we can see that we've recently reached similar levels of excitement to the period that preceded the great financial crisis in fact we also see that there was similar excitement around a soft Landing right before the 2001 recession occurred so is history about to repeat today with Wall Street getting excited about a soft Landing again right before another recession actually occurs in order to answer that we first need to get one thing straight what on Earth is a soft Landing this term refers to when the Federal Reserve the central bank has raised interest rates which most of the time ends up triggering an economic downturn but in a soft Landing they managed to lower them back down just in time before the economy can actually go into a recession so that's the theory but has this actually ever happened well this is a chart of the federal reserve's interest rate and we see that in the vast majority of cases where the FED has raised its interest rate a recession occurs shortly after afterwards now these recession bars are the official moments where the NBR has determined that the US economy was actually in a period of contraction they use a bunch of different data but the main thing that they look at is actually the unemployment rate that you see on this chart if people are losing their jobs and the unemployment rate is rising that usually gets classified as a recession and so we do see quite clearly that whenever the Federal Reserve raises its interest rate shortly afterwards we see the unemployment rate rise as the US experiences a recession something that we haven't yet seen this time around a soft Landing would be to see the Federal Reserve lower its interest rate again without ever seeing the unemployment rate rise substantially triggering a recession something that would look like this and this isn't a completely crazy thing to consider it happened in 1995 in 1984 in 1967 all three of these can be classified as soft Landing where despite the Federal Reserve raising interest rates the unemployment rate actually stayed low and the US never experienced a recession so out of the 11 times that the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates three of these were actually soft Landings could it be that they've just managed to pull off the fourth soft Landing of the last 50 years of data well last week we received some government data that got a lot of people excited about that possibility these were two economic data points on the US job market that showed supposedly it stayed incredibly resilient throughout the month of September this was the unemployment rate that came in below expectations at 4.1% which is below where it was in August at 4.2% meaning less people were unemployed in September than August and something called the non-farm payroll report showed that the economy added a mass of 254,000 jobs in the month of September that means according to government data that there are currently 159 million people that have jobs in the US a record high this isn't the type of thing you typically see during an economic recession this is what happened to the job market in the last four recessions but Peter the government data is rigged these are fake numbers why are you even paying attention to this perhaps there is some degree of manipulation of government data but when we look at the stock market it's also trading at all-time highs which reflects the current strength of the job market a strong job market and a strong stock market are things that we also saw in 1995 1984 and 1967 those three soft Landing so you can understand why many experts today believe that we are in a similar position to those instances so far despite the high interest rates from the Federal Reserve the economy and financial market look quite resilient but let's quickly rewind to October of 2007 here the government also posted a very strong jobs number showing that a record number of Americans were employed that very same month the stock market also made a new all-time high this was just a few months before the 2008 recession actually began remember those articles from the beginning of the video some of them were published right here so saying that a strong jobs market today predicts that it will remain is the equivalent to saying that sunny weather today is predicting sunny weather tomorrow it could be true but it could also be completely incorrect so how can we forecast what the economy is going to do next to forecast weather we can look at things like pressure wind speed temperature to try and get idea of what the weather is going to look like in economics probably the most important factor to look at is something called credit if credit is tight it means money is less available from Banks and that eventually slows the economy down the inverse is true when credit is loose money is readily available to borrow and that typically leads to economic strength this chart here gives a good indication of how tight or loose credit is in the United States High your readings on this chart correspond to tighter credit conditions and lower readings correspond to looser credit conditions and the ability for this indicator to predict recessions is quite spectacular we see that in the leadup to recessions credit typically tightens up now you'll immediately noticed that credit became significantly tighter in the second half of 2023 and this so far has not translated into an actual recession and now credit is all of a sudden becoming looser and you're probably thinking isn't that what a soft Landing is supposed to look like well when we look at 1995 which was actually a soft Landing we see that credit never tightened up so what effectively happened back here is that the Federal Reserve raised interest rates but money remained freely available in the economy never leading to an economic slowdown this is quite a different look to what we have and in our opinion that makes the odds of a soft Landing today much lower let me explain if we add the United States unemployment rate on top of this we see that it follows the tightness of credit but with a certain lack time this is a chart that we've shown you guys before and it has been so far absolutely spoton because when we shift forward the chart of the tightness of credit we see it perfectly predicts where the unemployment rate is going to go over the next year and a half and so here we understand why no recession ever occurred in 1995 because credit conditions were incredibly loose during that period and it also explains why the unemployment rate throughout 2024 has has been rising something that we've used to make multiple great Trad on our website and why we think the unemployment rate could actually continue to weaken until July of 2025 now if by then we haven't seen any real move up in the unemployment rate and credit conditions in the meantime have become significantly looser that would actually be a sign that the US economy did completely avoid a recession this time around and has experienced what Wall Street was hoping for a soft Landing we use a combination of our macro strategy and technical analysis to generate an investment strategy at Bravo research we've helped our clients put on incredibly successful trades throughout 2024 generating an average profit of 177% per trade while keeping our losses Limited in number and size click the link in the description below if you want to access our service