Economic Panic Sparks Stampede: What Are Top Economists Fleeing From?

What do you get when you cross the world’s most anxious academics with a literal cliffhanger? Apparently, the answer is a front-row seat to the wildest economic forecasting ritual known to humankind . Honestly, I always wondered whether economists ran spreadsheets or just sprinted for high ground whenever the wind whispered “recession”—turns out, it’s the latter (sometimes right off a ledge) . There’s a peculiar satisfaction in watching Ivy League minds react to bad market vibes the way lemmings respond to a kazoo . Sure, the stock market is rallying now, but when your financial fate rests on the “herd instincts” of people who list “Keynesian panic” as a skill on LinkedIn, are any of us truly safe from the next stampede? I guess when it comes to survival of the fittest, we’d all better hope the private equity crowd never learns to swim . For a breakdown of nature’s weirdest recession predictor and a brief lesson in economic humility, <a href="https://theonion.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/RecessionForecastsNIB_IHA-GR.jpg”>LEARN MORE.

NEW YORK—With unexplained natural phenomena having predicted seven of the last eight market collapses, experts confirmed the likelihood of a recession had increased Thursday amid reports that herds of panicked economists had started running off cliffs. “We still don’t know what causes them to do it, but economists can naturally sense a recession in the air, which triggers a mass panic and leads to these self-destructive stampedes,” said J.P. Morgan analyst Rebecca Herrera, who explained that before the Great Recession began in late 2007, thousands of spooked economists started running headlong off sheer drops into the canyons of the Colorado River. “Even as the bloody, broken bodies of Ivy League economics professors and Federal Reserve employees pile up on the rocks below, they will continue to throw themselves over the edge with no regard for their own life. While economists do tend to exhibit herd behavior, they will usually steer clear of dangerous river crossings and cliffs. Sometimes you get a scattering of individual jumps after a routine market downturn, but large economist stampedes like this always indicate a full-scale general recession. Some think they possess an instinct to sacrifice themselves when they sense lean times ahead, and it may be a behavior that evolved to thin the herd before mass layoffs.” At press time, the S&P 500 was rallying and forecasts of a recession were declining after a mass die-off of private equity owners.