Recessions won’t happen – metrics used to measure whether a recession is going to happen are no longer accurate.

The big question right now is whether the economy's gentle slowdown could morph into a painful downturn. But the signals that typically offer clues look more unreliable than ever. Why it matters: Recession indicators don't work like they used to. Many of them have been tripped, yet no big downturn has materialized. The quirks of the pandemic business cycle — driven by a rolling series of disruptions to supply and demand — are the likely culprit. Flashback: In the past, trends in temporary employment were a big tell — whatever happened in this sector soon happened in the broader job market. Or at least, that was the case ahead of recessions in 1991, 2001 and 2008. Declines in temp employment "preceded those in the overall labor market by 6 to 12 months" in the recessions before 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found. The intuition is straightforward: Companies cut back on temp employees to forestall layoffs of permanent workers. Temp employment peaked in March 2022; it has shed 515,000 jobs since then, a 16% drop. But total payroll employment has kept rising anyway. "The decline has been going on for way too long for me to say there's a direct linkage" to the rest of the economy, Ger Doyle, an executive at staffing agency Manpower, tells Axios.