It turns out economists are pretty good at forecasting recessions—but only when they're nearly upon us.

That’s according to an analysis this week by Jeremy Majerovitz, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Majerovitz found that if you poll a bunch of economists and average their answers together, the end result is a fairly accurate prediction of whether the economy will fall into a recession in the next quarter. However, he found, the precision of their predictions rapidly declines the farther into the future they try to forecast.

Recession predictions are big business these days, with economists debating whether the Federal Reserve’s campaign of anti-inflation interest rate hikes will tap the brakes too much and bring the economy into a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:recession. A quarterly survey of economists at the Philadelphia Fed gives a 34.4% chance the economy will shrink in the fourth quarter.

That prediction is likely on the money, according to Majerovitz’s research, which analyzed the accuracy and precision of  the Philly Fed’s🌱 Survey of Professional Forecasters. Still, a one-in-three chance leaves a lot of room for things to go either way.

“Economic forecasters provide useful information about the future state of the economy. But making predictions is hard, especially about the (distant) future,” Majerovitz wrote. “Even though forecasts can help, we must live with significant uncertainty about future economic conditions.”