Last updated Nov 29, 2025
Prediction
Friedberg
economyconflict
Conditional: If the Russia-Ukraine war continues through the 2022 spring planting season and related conditions keep deteriorating (e.g., agricultural disruption), the US economy will shift from its current slowdown into a very serious recession within the following year.
if this war continues and we don't get the spring planning and things keep deteriorating, I think we're headed for a very serious recession in this country. I think we'll go from slowdown to recession.View on YouTube
Explanation

The condition of the prediction largely occurred, but the outcome did not.

Condition (war + disrupted planting + deterioration):
– Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February 2022 and continued through the 2022 spring planting season and beyond, severely affecting agriculture and food security.(fao.org)
– Ukraine’s 2022 sowing campaign was completed on reduced area: about 13.4 million hectares of spring crops were sown—95% of the (already cut) projected area and roughly 80% of the previous year’s area, with major portions of land inaccessible due to the war.(ukrinform.net)
– The conflict caused substantial disruption to global grain and fertilizer markets, driving up prices and raising widespread concerns about food shortages and a global food crisis.(maxapress.com)
Taken together, this matches the normalized condition: the war persisted through the planting season and related agricultural/food‑market conditions deteriorated significantly, even though Ukraine still managed a partial planting.

Outcome ("very serious recession" in the U.S. within a year):
– Instead of entering a deep recession, the U.S. economy continued to expand. Real GDP grew about 1.9–2.1% in 2022 and 2.5% in 2023, with quarterly growth positive from mid‑2022 onward.(bea.gov)
– The labor market remained strong: the unemployment rate stayed in the mid‑3% range (around 3.6–3.8%) through late 2023, a historically low level, and employment kept rising.(bls.gov)
– The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the standard arbiter of U.S. business cycles, dates the last recession’s trough to April 2020 and has not declared any new recession since; analyses of the 2025 GDP dip still describe the expansion as ongoing.(nber.org)

Because the specified adverse conditions from the war and agricultural disruption did materialize to a significant degree, but the U.S. did not transition from a slowdown into a “very serious recession” in the following year, the conditional prediction’s implication about the U.S. economy is false. Therefore the prediction is scored as wrong.