ALL INPredictions
Last updated Nov 29, 2025
Prediction
Sacks
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Sacks @ 00:16:47Ambiguous
economypolitics
If President Biden does not forcefully intervene to end the port labor constraints and move Los Angeles/Long Beach ports to true 24/7 operations, the resulting supply chain disruption will trigger a US recession within the next year (by late 2022).
Look unless Biden is willing to listen I mean, Chamath, you're right that they're entitled to negotiate. But here's the thing. I mean, they're holding the whole country hostage now. They're holding the economy hostage. So at a certain point, if their demands are unreasonable, it's, I think, proper for the president of United States to step in and say, guys, this is ridiculous. You have to go back to work... unless Biden steps in to solve this, we will have a recession.View on YouTube
Explanation

Two different parts of Sacks’s conditional prediction are hard to score cleanly.

  1. Did Biden "step in" and move LA/Long Beach to 24/7 operations?
    Within days of the podcast, the White House announced an agreement for the Port of Los Angeles to expand to 24/7 operations, joining the Port of Long Beach, after negotiations with port directors, the longshore union and major shippers.(bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov) However, reporting at the time noted that only some terminals and shifts actually ran 24/7 and industry figures called the initiative incomplete or largely symbolic.(washingtonpost.com) So whether Biden "steps in to solve this" and creates "true 24/7" ports is a judgment call rather than a clear yes/no.

  2. Did the US enter a recession within a year (by October 16, 2022)?
    Initial GDP data showed real GDP falling in both Q1 2022 and Q2 2022, leading many outlets and analysts to say the US had entered a technical recession (two consecutive quarters of negative growth).(icis.com) But the official arbiter, the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, never declared a 2022 recession, and its chronology still shows the last recession ending in April 2020.(nber.org) Then, in 2024, a comprehensive GDP revision from the Commerce Department/BEA showed Q2 2022 had in fact grown at about a 0.3% annual rate, eliminating even the earlier two‑quarter contraction; later commentary explicitly noted that the supposed 2022 technical recession was a data illusion.(axios.com)

Putting this together:

  • On one reading, Biden did intervene on port operations and no official 2022 recession occurred, so the conditional ("unless he steps in, we will have a recession") was never tested.
  • On another, his intervention was too limited to count as "solving" the port issue, and contemporaneous data showed two quarters of GDP decline that many labeled a recession, which would make the prediction look roughly right.
  • With later data revisions and the lack of an NBER recession call, even the outcome (recession vs no recession) is contested.

Because both the policy condition (what counts as stepping in and true 24/7) and the economic outcome (whether 2022 counts as a recession) are genuinely disputed given current evidence, the prediction cannot be cleanly marked as simply right or wrong; it is best classified as ambiguous.