It hasn't been a great time for folks in the business of predicting recessions.

The Conference Board's Leading Economic Index signaled a recession in 2022. The highly regarded inverted yield curve recession indicator has been activated since November 2022. Even the commonly accepted layperson's definition of recession — two negative quarters of GDP — occurred in 2022. Most recently, the Sahm Rule , which measures short-term rises in unemployment, triggered its recession red flag in early August.

But as many economists will tell you, the US isn't and hasn't been in recession.

The creators of all these measures say this time may be different — their indicators could be, and have been, showing false positives. And the notable distortions to economic data from a global pandemic have unquestionably made the prediction business harder.

But the latest failures also reveal a harsh truth about the recession prediction game: Recession indicators aren't perfect, and they likely never will be.

Just ask one of the most prominent recession indicator creators.

"The economy is so complex that ... it's unlikely that we get the perfect indicator," Duke University professor and Canadian economist Campbell Harvey, who invented the inverted yield curve indicator, told Yahoo Finance.