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<[link removed]>

August 30


 



Is This How America Ends?

Find Out More →
<[link removed]>

 






Editor's note: Life in America is about to take a very strange turn, says one
of Wall Street's best-connected millionaires, who called the 2000 and 2008
crises, all while building his own $200 million hedge fund firm.

At Harvard, Whitney Tilson became close friends with billionaire hedge-fund
manager Bill Ackman...

He took on radical socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani
in a public debate last year...

He accurately forecast the 2000 tech wreck and starred in an Emmy-winning 60
Minutes episode on the 2008 financial crisis...

And he's one of the best-connected insiders in America today, with dozens of
millionaire and billionaire friends. (He even bakes cookies for Warren Buffett
at Christmas.)

I'm telling you this today because Tilson says the next six months are going
to be a time ofextreme change in our country.
<[link removed]>

He's warning that America is in the early stages of a crisis that no one in
our country can avoid.

It's connected to the huge (and rapid) changes we've seen as a result of AI
and other radical new technology.

But Tilson isn't merely warning of more job losses, or another big selloff in
the stock market (though he says both of those things are highly likely in the
near future).

He says we're living through a permanent reset that'll destroy the America you
grew up in.
<[link removed]>

"I'm 59. I'm a father. And what's coming in America's near future keeps me
awake at night, frankly," he said.

That's why he's stepping forward publicly today.

If he's right, 2026 will be a year like no other – and it's crucial you
prepare.

In fact, there are several things Tilson recommends you do immediately to get
ready.(Step #1 alone could make you more than stocks, bonds, and even gold.)
<[link removed]>

I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes to hear Tilson's latest
prediction.

We've posted everything you need to know on our website, free of charge.

Everything you need to know is right here.
<[link removed]>

Regards,

Matt Weinschenk
Publisher and Director of Research, Stansberry Research


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Stansberry Research pleaseclick here
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THE HILL REPORT

Recessions Are Not Forecast in Advance

Connor Hill · InsightfulWord · August 30, 2026

The Congressional Budget Office publishes an annual assessment of how accurate
its own economic forecasts have been. It has done so for decades, it compares
itself against the Administration, the Blue Chip consensus and the Survey of
Professional Forecasters, and the document is free.

That is a genuinely unusual institutional practice. Most organizations issuing
forecasts do not publish a scorecard of their previous ones, and the absence of
such a scorecard is the single most informative fact about most forecasting.

The record itself is instructive. Across forecasts going back to 1976, the
mean absolute error of two-year-ahead projections of real output growth is about
0.9 percentage points. For consumer price inflation it is about 0.7 points, and
for the three-month Treasury bill rate about 1.0 points.

Those are respectable numbers for a difficult task and they are large relative
to the quantities being forecast. An error of 0.9 points on a growth rate that
typically runs between one and three percent is not a small error.

The more consequential finding concerns turning points. The report states
plainly that forecasts made just before a recession tend to be overly
optimistic, because downturns cannot be accurately predicted from the
information available, and that accuracy across all four sources is lower in
periods overlapping a recession.

That is the professional consensus stated by the institution with the
best-documented record: the specific event everyone most wants forecast is the
one that is not forecastable from available data. It has been the pattern
across every downturn for which records exist, and it applies to official
forecasters, private forecasters and market-implied measures alike.

What follows is what the error record shows in detail, why turning points are
structurally the hard part, the difference between a scenario and a prediction,
what a falsifiable warning would contain, and which series move before anyone
announces anything.

What the Error Record Shows

The value of a published scorecard is that it converts a general impression
into measurable quantities, and several of the measurements are
counterintuitive.

Accuracy does not degrade much between the two-year and the five-year horizon.
That sounds like good news and is not: it indicates that the two-year forecast
is not capturing much beyond the long-run averages that anchor the five-year
one.

Forecasts are on average slightly too optimistic, by small amounts. The bias
is modest and it is persistent, which is itself informative about the
institutional pressures on forecasting.

The comparison across sources is close. The official forecaster is generally
about as accurate as the private consensus, occasionally better, occasionally
worse. There is no source in this comparison with a demonstrably superior
record, which is what one would expect if the residual error reflects genuine
uncertainty rather than differences in skill.

And errors cluster. Most of the total error across the whole record is
concentrated in a small number of periods — the ones containing turning points
— with long stretches of comparatively accurate forecasting in between.

That clustering explains why forecasting looks better than it is. A forecaster
reviewing their own record over a decade without a downturn sees mostly small
errors and concludes the method works. The method works in the conditions where
the outcome was never in doubt, and fails in the conditions that determine
whether the forecast was worth having.


Why Turning Points Are the Hard Part

There is a structural reason, and it is not a failure of effort or of modeling.


📈 Capital Ledger

0.9 percentage points

Mean absolute error of two-year-ahead forecasts of real output growth in the
Congressional Budget Office's assessment of its own record since 1976,
alongside 0.7 points for consumer price inflation. The report states that
downturns cannot be accurately predicted from available information and that
accuracy across all forecasters is lower in periods overlapping recessions.
Source: Congressional Budget Office,CBO's Economic Forecasting Record: 2025
Update.


Support or oppose: should published forecasts be required to carry the
forecaster's own error record?

Supporters argue that a forecast without an accuracy history is
uninterpretable, that institutions issuing them track their record internally,
and that publishing it would restrain the confidence of the presentation.
Opponents answer that error records are themselves easy to construct favorably
by choosing the sample, that a track record on aggregates says nothing about a
specific call, and that the requirement would attach a spurious precision to
what is inherently uncertain. Which effect dominates?Hit reply — one line is
enough.

Economic forecasts are built substantially on the persistence of current
conditions. Most of the time that works, because the economy is in fact
persistent — growth this quarter is the best single predictor of growth next
quarter.

A turning point is by definition a break in persistence. Forecasting one
requires identifying, in advance, that the relationships holding until now are
about to stop holding — which the data cannot show, because the data describe
the period in which they held.

Compounding this, downturns are frequently triggered by discrete events: a
policy shock, a financial failure, a geopolitical rupture, a pandemic. Those
are not smoothly evolving quantities that a model can extrapolate. They are
events, and their timing is not encoded in prior observations.

The consequence is that the honest form of a downturn forecast is
probabilistic and unimpressive: a statement about elevated risk over a period,
not a date. Forecasters who issue such statements are ignored, and forecasters
who issue confident dates are quoted, which shapes the incentives of everyone
in the business.


The Difference Between a Scenario and a Prediction

The distinction is the most useful analytical tool in this area and it is
systematically blurred.

A scenario describes a coherent chain of events and what would follow if it
occurred. It is a valuable exercise, used by central banks in stress testing
and by companies in planning, and it makes no claim about likelihood.

A prediction assigns probability. It says this will happen, or is likely to,
within a period.

The two are frequently presented in the same document with the same voice, and
a reader cannot tell them apart unless the writer distinguishes them. A
scenario written vividly reads exactly like a prediction, and its author can
later claim to have described events accurately without ever having said they
would occur.

The test is simple. A prediction can be wrong. If no outcome would falsify a
statement, it is a scenario, and scenarios are useful for preparation and
useless for positioning.

There is a further device worth recognizing because it appears constantly. A
claim framed as a permanent change to conditions — a reset, a new era, a
transformation — cannot be falsified by any single observation, since any
period can be described as an early stage of it. Statements of that shape are
unusually durable in the marketplace for exactly that reason, and their
durability is a property of the framing rather than evidence of their accuracy.


Context — what preparation and positioning are not

Nothing here argues against preparing for adverse outcomes. Holding a cash
reserve, avoiding leverage that would force a sale, keeping insurance current
and knowing what a household's fixed obligations are in a bad year are all
sensible regardless of any forecast, and they cost little when nothing happens.
That is preparation. Positioning is different: it is taking a concentrated
financial bet on a specific outcome within a specific window, and it carries a
cost when the outcome does not arrive. The two get conflated, and material that
begins with the first frequently ends with the second.


What a Falsifiable Warning Contains

Four elements convert an alarming statement into one that can be evaluated
afterwards.

A specific claim about an observable quantity — an index level, an
unemployment rate, an inflation reading — rather than a description of
conditions.

A date or a window, stated in advance.

A stated probability, or at least a stated confidence, so that being wrong
once is distinguishable from being wrong systematically.

And a record: what the same source predicted previously, with dates, and what
happened.

Almost nothing in the promotional forecasting genre contains all four, and the
absence is not accidental. A statement with all four can be checked, and being
checked is the risk the format is designed to avoid.

Where a source does publish such a record, it is worth reading carefully
rather than dismissively. Several established forecasters do, and their records
generally show what the official scorecard shows: reasonable accuracy in
ordinary conditions, misses at turning points, and no persistent edge.


Which Series Move Before Anything Is Announced

If forecasts are weak, the alternative is to watch the data directly, and a
handful of series are published frequently, revised transparently, and lead the
aggregates.

Initial claims for unemployment insurance, published weekly, are among the
most timely labor market indicators available and are not subject to the long
revision cycles that affect other series.

The yield curve — the spread between long and short government rates — has an
unusually good historical record ahead of downturns, and the reason it works is
debated. Its lead time has been long and variable, which limits its usefulness
for timing.

Job openings and quits from the labor turnover survey describe the demand side
of the labor market with more sensitivity than the headline employment figure.

Credit conditions, from the senior loan officer survey, capture bank
willingness to lend, which is one of the more direct transmission channels into
activity.

None of these predicts a date. Together they describe the current state with
less lag than the headline figures, which is a more modest and considerably
more attainable objective than forecasting, and every one of them is free.


The bill, not the debate

The institution with the best-documented forecasting record publishes its own
errors annually and states plainly that downturns cannot be predicted from the
information available. Everyone forecasting is working with the same
limitation; the difference is who admits it. When a warning arrives with a
window attached, does the source publish what it said last time?Connor Hill
reads every reply.


Sources checked: Congressional Budget Office — CBO's Economic Forecasting
Record: 2025 Update <[link removed]> · Federal Reserve
Bank of Philadelphia — Survey of Professional Forecasters and its error history
<[link removed]>
·U.S. Department of Labor — weekly unemployment insurance claims
<[link removed]> · U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Job
Openings and Labor Turnover Survey <[link removed]> · Board of
Governors of the Federal Reserve System — Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on
Bank Lending Practices <[link removed]> ·
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED — Treasury yield curve spreads
<[link removed]>


Connor Hill · InsightfulWord





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