Four months after the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the U.S. was officially in a recession, a plurality of economists predict that the U.S. economy won’t truly be back to normal before 2022. According to the data collected by FiveThirtyEight, 46% of economists predict that the economy won’t return to pre-crisis levels until 2022 while only 9% expect the economy to return to those same levels in 2021. Economists are generally pessimistic about the state of recovery due to (1) the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. rising again and (2) Congress’ failure to pass a second relief bill. Dr. Allan Timmermann, an economist at University of California at San Diego, notes that “the combination of delayed fiscal stimulus and bad news on the virus could indeed cause something of a double dip later this year.” Economists are more optimistic about the state of unemployment, predicting a 7.4% unemployment rate by the end of the year.

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