From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Taverni-C, and this is the Daily.

After months of worry about a possible recession, it is now looking increasingly likely that

the U.S. has managed to avoid one.

Today, I talked to my colleague, Jim Tangersley, about that brighter economic picture, and

about why, at least so far, Americans aren't giving President Biden much credit for it.

It's Monday, August 7th.

So Jim, we've talked a bunch on the show about the economy and about how the government's

been trying to threaten needle, right?

Including inflation, on the one hand, while avoiding sending the economy into a recession

on the other.

And when we had you on the show last year, you talked about this, and you said there were

two potential outcomes.

One was the U.S. would experience a soft landing, which, as the name suggests, is kind of

pillowy and painless, or the U.S. would experience a hard landing, which is a recession,

with lots of job loss and pain.

Where are we today in the government's threading of that needle?

Well, I think let's be really direct about it.

We are in the midst of some of the best economic data, if not the best economic data, of Joe

Biden's presidency.

And those data are giving a lot of economists and forecasters more and more confidence that

they might pull this soft landing thing off, that it just might come to pass that the

economy is able to make it out of high inflation, without falling back into a recession, and

...