Will there be a recession in 2026?
Probability of YES, as priced by the market right now.
What the venue is pricing.
- Probability
- 13%
- 24h volume
- $4.8K
- Liquidity
- —
- Bid/ask spread
- 2.0 pts
- Closes
- JAN 31, 2027
- Venue
- Kalshi ↗
Readings are live from the venue’s public API, revalidated every five minutes. The spread is the market’s own uncertainty proxy — wider means less agreement on the number above.
The number is the end of a chain. This is the chain.
The Sahm rule: the 3-month average unemployment rate rising 0.5pp above its 12-month low — historically the cleanest real-time recession trigger.
From a number to a defensible decision.
A recession call is exactly the kind of question where correlation quietly substitutes for cause. On the substrate, each link in this chain would be a proposed edge that a human approves or rejects, and identify() would refuse an estimate wherever the confounding can't be closed — abstention recorded, not papered over. When the desk does act on the number, record_decision() freezes the expected outcome first, so 2027's calibration review is scored against what was actually believed in 2026.