It didn’t take Brexit to make forecasters take a dim view of the future of the U.S. economy. A cloud considerably larger than a man’s hand hovered over the computers of most forecasters before Brexit shocked markets into a deep but transient swoon. The Federal Reserve Board said it dare not raise interest rates a trifling 0.25 percent lest it slow the sluggish recovery. The International Monetary Fund lowered its forecast for this year, and now expects the U.S. economy to grow more slowly this year than last. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal raised their year-end forecast that a recession will occur this year from 15 percent to 21 percent, with the J.P. Morgan Chase model putting that probability at 36 percent.

Some of the gloom stemmed from last month’s weak jobs report. Some stemmed from a belief that recoveries eventually die of old age, making the current 72-month old recovery long-in-tooth when compared with the 58-month average in the post-WWII era. But one month’s jobs data do not a trend make, as we are likely to learn when the next report is released On July 8, and recent research suggests that, unlike our knees, hips and cars, recoveries do not become more likely to break down the older they get.