Moody's Chief Economist: If the Hormuz Strait Blockade Continues, U.S. Economic Recession Will Be Hard to Avoid

BlockBeats News, March 17th. Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody's, said that as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to tanker traffic, the U.S. economic outlook will continue to deteriorate, despite the fact that current U.S. oil and natural gas production is roughly in line with consumption.

Zandi believes that if the situation remains unchanged in the coming weeks, a U.S. economic recession will become unavoidable. Even before the Iran conflict, Moody's machine-learning-based leading indicators had shown a 49% probability of the U.S. entering a recession in the next 12 months. Zandi expects that the next release of the model will indicate a recession probability of 50% or higher.

Currently, several investment banks still maintain recession probabilities in the 30% to 40% range. The Adnaan Research team recently raised the probability of a market crash from 20% to 35%. The S&P 500 Index rose 1% on Monday to close at 6699.38 points, and Wall Street has not yet priced in the recession overall.