Richard Exell thinks a recession is likely. Personally, I couldn't care less. Economic forecasts are both futile and irrelevant.
They're futile because we simply don't have the intellectual resources to predict (pdf) GDP to within the (narrow) margin of error that makes a difference between a 'good' and bad 'forecast'. This is not because of the shortcomings of neoclassical economics, many as they are. It's because human affairs generally aren't predictable. Political scientists can't forecast (pdf) revolutions, criminologists can't forecast riots, marketers can't forecast which products (pdf) will sell and which not. And so on. As Ambrose Bierce put it 100 years ago in his Devil's Dictionary:

Predict, v.t. To relate an event that has not occurred, is not occurring, and will not occur.

A big reason for this is that social behaviour is an emergent process; quite simple individual behaviour generates complex structures. In economics there are (at least) three types of problem here:
- What'll happen to technical progress? If there are popular new products or processes, we can get a boom in consumer spending or investment as people spend on these. But we can't predict the pace or success of innovation.
- (How) irrational will people be? One issue now is whether bosses' overconfidence will raise capital spending by more than spare capacity, the apparent dearth of investment opportunities and uncertainty depresses it. This is not precisely quantifiable.
- Will individuals' behaviour be correlated or not? If lots of people buy at the same time, we get booms and bubbles. If they try and sell at the same time, we get crashes. But predicting such correlations is impossible.
You might object here that some people did foresee the crisis. I'm not sure. For one thing, if enough people throw darts, some will hit a treble 20 without having any skill. Those who called the crisis were, at best, folk who reasonably pointed out risks and, at worst, charlatans who got lucky without great insight: as far as I can tell (and please feel free to direct me to evidence otherwise), a lot of these did little more than go 'Debt. Woooo.'
Maybe they'll come a time when we get sufficient knowledge (pdf) of complexity (pdf) to make reliable forecasts. Maybe not. Until, then, though, forecasting is just a way of risking making fools of ourselves.
And, what's more, for no very good purpose.
For almost all policy purposes, we don't need to know next year's GDP. What's the right tax-benefit system, or planning regime, or bank regulation? A GDP forecast is irrelevant to these.
Even orthodox macroeconomic policy doesn't really need forecasts. The conventional Taylor rule doesn't use them. And the debate about whether to loosen fiscal policy or not is about the risks of a debt crisis versus the desire to reduce unemployment, rather than hinging on any forecast.
I suspect that the desire for macro forecasts is a historic legacy. When governments thought they could tweak growth by monetary and fiscal policy means, it needed them. But we are at least 30 years past that stage now. And when firms were big, inflexible behemoths, they needed to forecast next year's demand. Fordist firms needed forecasts. But Zaraist ones don't. It's time we moved into the Zaraist age.