Chris Lafakis, a director at Moody’s Analytics, spoke on Wednesday in Asheville and gave his thoughts on the national economy.

Before he launched into his prepared statements at the 2025 Annual Economic Outlook on Wednesday, he conducted a quick poll of the crowd.

“I'm going to take the temperature a little bit, and then I'm going to give you some factors that have been going on in the economy that are worrisome or troubling, and then I'm going to you're going to be thoroughly depressed, and I'm going to lift you back up,” he prefaced his poll.

Then he asked for a show of hands of the people who were “supremely confident that the US economic expansion will continue into 2026.” Then he asked who was “a little bit more worried that ‘26 might not be the greatest year, where you see the storm clouds on the horizon.”

Hands of those in attendance at the Omni Grove Park Inn were raised for both, which showed attendees of the event had feelings for each comment.

Lafakis, according to Moody’s website, “oversees the Moody’s Analytics climate risk initiative, and is responsible for climate modeling and scenario creation. He also has expertise in macroeconomics, energy economics, model development and model validation.”

Lafakis said that Moody’s has a machine-learning model that estimates the probability that the U.S. economy will go into recession in the next 12 months and, at the moment, that probability is at 42 percent.

“I would say that I am more optimistic than our model is, and I do expect 2026 to be a good year,” he said.

Lafakis said that the country is on the cusp of creating enough jobs to keep the unemployment rate from rising. Jobs have to be created because the labor force continues to grow, he said.

He said that tariffs, a lack of labor, public sector layoffs, and artificial intelligence have been issues for the work force in the past year. Even with these factors, there are still somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 new jobs being created monthly.

While a large portion of his talk felt negative, Lafakis was able to add a bit of positivity to his speech.

“We're still creating almost the same number of jobs that we need to keep the unemployment rate from rising and layoffs are low,” he said. “You cannot have a recession without layoffs. So this is the most positive takeaway that I would have on the labor market, is that even though the hiring rate is low, at a 12-year low, and if you don't have layoffs, people don't lose their jobs, then you don't fall into the negative cycle of people losing jobs, people not spending and then that causes businesses to retrench. That's the self-reinforcing negative cycle.”

While artificial intelligence was mentioned in Lafakis’ comments about the problems with the labor force, he also said it was “the biggest thing we have going for us.” AI, he said, is causing an arms race in the technology world as companies spend more and more money in order to create and use AI.

He added that an expectation of a cut in interest rates (which happened later that day) along with fiscal stimulus would help keep the U.S. economy growing.

After his prepared statements, Lafakis also answered questions from the crowd about the economy before the event ended.