Goldman Sachs analysts Jan Hatzius, Sven Jari Stehn, and David Mericle crunched some GDP numbers and calculated the odds of the world's countries being in recession at any given time, and also the odds of them going into recession imminently.
"The main take-away is that unconditional recession probabilities are sizable," they said in a recent note to investors. "For the US economy, for example, the unconditional probability of being in recession is 15% in any given quarter, and as high as 34% over any given two years." Great Britain's risk is about the same as the US:
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Perhaps more importantly, those numbers imply the risk of imminent recession, too. Bad news, Canada and Japan:
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