The prediction was conditional: if the U.S. entered a recession sometime between roughly August 2024 and August 2025, then the federal government would roll out significant countercyclical programs that kept equities rallying or at least “strong” despite that recession.

On the first part – whether a recession actually occurred in that window – the evidence is mixed and not cleanly resolved:

• The NBER-based recession indicator used by the St. Louis Fed remains at 0 (expansion) through at least October 2025, meaning no official post‑2020 recession has been dated yet. (fred.stlouisfed.org)
• Major forecasters (IMF, RBC, UBS, various banks) describe a sharp slowdown / soggy or near‑zero growth and elevated recession risk in 2025, but generally do not say a clear, broad U.S. recession is underway; some emphasize the distinction between a “growth recession” and a formally defined recession. (livemint.com)
• Academic work using unemployment/vacancy classifiers estimates around a 71% probability the U.S. was already in recession as of May 2025, but that is probabilistic model evidence, not a widely accepted determination. (arxiv.org)

On the second part – government support and equity performance – the picture is also not cleanly attributable to what Friedberg described:

• The U.S. did suffer a sharp stock market crash in early April 2025 tied to Trump’s broad “Liberation Day” tariff shock, but by late August 2025 the S&P 500 had rebounded and was up about 9–10% year‑to‑date, implying equities were again relatively strong. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Federal actions in this period were dominated by aggressive tariff policy, talk of future tax cuts, and assurances from Treasury and the Fed that the system was sound and that tools were available if needed; there is little evidence of large, new, clearly countercyclical market‑support programs of the kind seen in 2008 or 2020 rolled out specifically in response to an acknowledged recession. (ft.com)

Because (1) it is not clearly established that the U.S. was in a formal, broad‑based recession during the specified period, and (2) any subsequent equity strength cannot be unambiguously tied to distinct, recession‑response government programs, the prediction cannot be judged definitively true or false on the available record. Hence the outcome is best classified as ambiguous rather than right, wrong, or merely “too early.”