Your standards for "clockwork" regularity seem to be quite low. Your own source offered to support that claim shows almost double that frequency from 1950-1990, and a maximum interval of 10 years, 8 months over the whole period. So it is neither "like clockwork" over that period (the frequency has on average dropped over the period, but the intervals are highly variable from one to the next), and not averaging anything like 10 years.
If you are planning your investments around not having a recession about once a decade, I'm unconvinced it will end well for you.
Anyway, the point stands - regularly predicting recessions is a sensible approach, and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong. The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent. Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.
No, its not, because recessions do not occur on a regular pattern. And even if they did, its still possible to predict them much more frequently than they do occur.
> and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong.
Just doing a quick search, ZeroHedge seems to have predicted a recession, counting only predictions with a one year or shorter forward window, literally every year since the end of the of the Great Recession. In many of those years, they made at least one prediction where the window was effectively negative, as they claimed that the US was already in a recession that just wasn't yet recognized.
So, yes, ZeroHedge significantly overpredicts recessions, as they have predicted not less than 11 of the last 1 recessions.
> The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent.
That's a non-sequitur, in any case.
> Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.
Sure, but if ZeroHedge was consistently predicting a recession within 5 years, they'd still be overpredicting by quite a lot (not if this was 1950-1990, but it isn't), but they are much, much worse than that.
I'm quite certain if someone simulated trading based on predicted recessions on ZH, you would end up well below market returns.
No question ZeroHedge is excessively pessimistic, but that saying is silly. The US has been having recessions almost like clockwork once every 10 years since 1950 [0].
Saying "a recession is incoming!" is pretty much trivially true. It is always very likely there will be a recession in the next 10 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...