Using the standard U.S. benchmark for recessions—the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee—there has been no recession in the United States since the brief COVID-19 downturn that ended with a trough in April 2020. The NBER’s official chronology lists the most recent peak as February 2020 and the most recent trough as April 2020, with no subsequent peaks or troughs announced through 2025, implying continuous expansion from May 2020 onward.citeturn0search2turn0search3 This means no NBER‑defined recession occurred between March 2022 and March 2023 or between March 2022 and March 2024, the one‑year and two‑year windows implied by Sacks’s statement.

Contemporary analysis also notes that while real GDP was negative in the first two quarters of 2022 (often called a "technical recession"), multiple sources emphasized that this did not meet the NBER’s broader recession criteria and that the NBER did not declare a recession for 2022.citeturn1search1turn1search4turn1search9 Moreover, later commentary on the prolonged 2022–early‑2025 yield‑curve inversion explicitly observes that no recession actually followed despite the inversion, calling into question the yield curve’s traditional reliability as a recession predictor in this episode.citeturn0news14

Sacks invoked historical statistics that an inverted yield curve implies “>2/3” odds of recession within a year and “~98%” odds within two years, and was clearly using those statistics to assert that a recession was extremely likely in the then‑future period. Since, under the standard NBER definition, no recession had occurred by March 2023 or March 2024, the specific event he treated as overwhelmingly probable did not happen in time. On an event‑level evaluation ("did the predicted recession occur by the stated horizons?"), this makes the prediction wrong.