The financial analyst, who correctly predicted the crisis of 2007-2008, said that the resilience in the U.S. economy since the end of the pandemic has mostly been due to the labor market, but this might start to slow down in the near future.
"You haven't had that weakness in labor markets that, I think, you normally would have had and would have [caused] a recession [in 2023]," he told CNBC. "That doesn't mean we won't have one, but it means whatever it is, it's delayed."
He added that there are already "preliminary signs of weakness" in the market that would suggest it is slowing down, including wage gains, quits and service inflation.
Comment: And there's reason to believe that the labor market statistics have been propped up by migrants:
Financial analyst Gary Shilling has warned there are "preliminary signs of weakness" in the labor market. Getty
"It's the service inflation [that] really is a difficulty for the Fed, and if you look at wages in the service area, they're rising 5 percent or 6 percent year over year," he said. "Now that's hardly commensurate with the Fed's target of 2 percent inflation."
The financial analyst said that there's no "clear evidence that the economy is falling apart" to justify the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates.
"As long as employment is as strong as it is, the Fed is in no rush to cut interest rates," he said.
Newsweek contacted Shilling for comment by email on Monday.
Any prediction made by Shilling is usually taken seriously considering that he was proven to be correct in his previous warnings. In 2007, he warned that "housing would sink the economy" ahead of the bursting of the housing bubble. In 2008, he said a "serious recession" was likely to consume the U.S. economy — and it did.
Comment: Although he certainly wasn't the only one.
Now, Shilling said that the recession many feared would hit the U.S. in 2023, but failed to do so, might still materialize if the labor market slows.
"We've had more strength in employment than probably is commensurate with the state of business," he said. "Small businesses are very sensitive to economic conditions because they don't tend to be very heavily capitalized. They are cutting back on their employment and other areas."
According to Shilling, small business is one of the "normal harbingers of recessions."
On X, formerly Twitter, Shilling wrote that "despite a seemingly universal feeling that the economy is in for a soft landing, I see some reliable recession harbingers: inverted yield curve, still-high interest rates, declining leading indicators index."
Comment: It's fairly obvious that the US economy in particular bears little relation to its productivity nor its wealth, and that, partly due to its interconnectedness, another global economic crash is on the cards: Germany slides into recession, joining UK, Japan, Ireland, and Finland