Runaway inflation. Surging interest rates. Bank failures. For a while it seemed like all of these issues would combine to trigger a US recession. Not so fast, says Morgan Stanley’s Seth Carpenter, the bank’s global chief economist. He joined the What Goes Up podcast to explain why there are signs the US could experience a “soft landing” that averts a major economic downturn. 

“It seems hard to avoid the fact that the US economy is going to slow down, and part of the reason why that’s hard to avoid is because that is absolutely, categorically, by design the Fed’s objective,” he said. “We think they’re looking carefully at the data and asking, ‘Do we have enough evidence that things are slowing down a lot, but not yet crashing?’ Because that’s what they’re looking for in order to stop the hiking cycle. So we think the last hike is in May, when there’ll be more evidence of a slowdown, but not yet evidence that things have actually fallen off of a cliff.”