The Elusive Soft Landing Is Coming Into View

The U.S. economy is approaching what most economists had thought either unlikely or impossible: inflation returning to its prepandemic norm without a recession or even much economic weakness, a so-called soft landing.

“What we are expecting now is a soft landing,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “We expect the economy to weaken quite a bit, but it does look like we’ll avoid an outright contraction” in gross domestic product.

Six months ago, the consensus among economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal was that the economy...