Is a recession coming or not? Here's what to look for in the economic data

There’s an old saying that a watched pot never boils, and that description seems to apply to recession risks right now.

Americans have been awaiting, and fearing, an economic downturn all year, and yet a prolonged slump still hasn’t arrived. It now seems highly unlikely that a recession will materialize before 2023, and maybe not even then.

Part of the problem: A lot of us are watching the wrong pots heat up.

Each time a negative economic report comes out, it fans the flames of recessionary worry, but a lot of those indicators and releases don’t factor directly into the recession/expansion calculations.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, a nongovernmental group composed largely of university economists, is the organization that determines when recessions arrive and how long they endure. Here’s what they focus on and what they largely ignore: