In the 2008 movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the title character played by Brad Pitt ages in reverse, transitioning over time from an old man to a young child. Oddly enough, I think the U.S. economy is doing something similar.

Instead of the typical four-stage business cycle — early, mid, late and recession — we have witnessed since the end of World War II, the economy appears to be transitioning from late-cycle characteristics of tight monetary policy and rising cost pressures back to mid-cycle, where corporate profits tend to peak, credit demand picks up and monetary policy is generally neutral.

The next step should have been recession but, in my view, we have clearly avoided that painful part of the business cycle and essentially moved backward in economic time to a healthier condition.

How did this happen? Much like the movie, it’s a bit of a mystery, but I think the Benjamin Button economy has resulted largely from post-pandemic distortions in the U.S. labor market that were signaling late-cycle conditions. However, other broader economic indicators that I think may be more reliable today are flashing mid-cycle.

If the U.S. economy is mid-cycle, as I believe, then we could be on the way to a multi-year expansion period that may not produce a recession until 2028. In the past, this type of economic environment has produced stock market returns in the range of 14% a year and provided generally favorable conditions for bonds.

The unemployment rate gap

Stay with me for a moment while I explain my methodology. Instead of using standard unemployment figures to determine business cycle stages, I prefer to look at the unemployment rate gap. That’s the gap between the actual unemployment rate (currently 4.2%) and the natural rate of unemployment, often referred to as the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU. That number typically falls in a range from 5.0% to 6.0%. Simply put, it’s the level of unemployment below which inflation would be expected to rise.

While this is a summary measure of dating the business cycle, it is based on a more comprehensive approach that looks at monetary policy, cost pressures, corporate profit margins, capital expenditures and overall economic output.

The unemployment gap is a measure that can be tracked each month with the release of the U.S. employment report. The reason it has worked so well is because the various gap stages tend to correlate with the underlying factors of each business cycle. For example, when labor markets are tight, cost pressures tend to be high, corporate profits fall and the economy tends to be late cycle.

This approach also worked nicely in pre-pandemic times, providing an early warning signal of late-cycle economic vulnerability in 2019. That was followed by the brief COVID recession from February 2020 to April 2020.

It’s likely that the pandemic has distorted the U.S. labor market, structurally and cyclically. For example, the labor force participation rate experienced an unprecedented decline as global economic activity came to a virtual standstill. That was followed by a remarkable rebound in the participation rate above pre-pandemic levels for prime-age (25- to 54-year-old) workers.

In other words, traditional ways of looking at the unemployment picture are now less useful tools for calibrating broader economic conditions. They've become less correlated with classic business cycle dynamics. Not recognizing these changes can lead to overly optimistic or overly pessimistic assessments of the cycle.

Market implications: Stocks and bonds could do well

My macroeconomic view drives my equity market view. As I said, an economy that is mid-cycle has tended to produce equity returns of approximately 14% on an annualized basis. Small-cap stocks have generally outpaced large caps, value has outpaced growth, and the materials and real estate sectors have generated the best returns. These figures are based on a Capital Group assessment of market returns from December 1973 to August 2024.

As always, it’s important to acknowledge that past results are not reflective of results in future periods. But if the U.S. economy continues to grow at a healthy rate — 2.5% to 3.0% in my estimation — that should provide a nice tailwind for equity prices. Over long periods of time, when the U.S. economy grows above its potential 2.0% growth rate, that type of environment has generally supported better-than-average stock market returns.