David Rosenberg is one of those rare people who consider the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book to be a page-turner. The publication, released eight times a year, is filled with anecdotes from business leaders and bankers around the country describing the state of the economy in ways that headline numbers cannot.

“It shows you what a fun-loving guy I am,” the founder and president of Toronto-based Rosenberg Research tells Forbes.

Curious about where the economy was headed next, Rosenberg decided to go all in. He went through the Beige Books published the month before every recession over the last 40 years. His startling conclusion: the latest editions were the gloomiest.

“There’s no way you could read that Beige Book and not come to the conclusion that the economy isn’t already starting a recession,” Rosenberg says.

A year ago, a recession forecast was a popular call among tea-leaf readers. But as one pleasant surprise in economic news followed another, more and more prognosticators peeled off. Last month, only 9% said that a contraction was more likely than not, down from 18% in October. For economists still on the fence, Friday’s announcement of positive January job growth gave them 353,000 new reasons to call off their recession bets. Judging by a sampling of Market Outlooks dropping into clients’ in-boxes, here’s guessing that just about all of them have.

But Rosenberg and a handful of other experts aren’t budging. They contend that most chartwatchers are cheerful because they’re looking at the wrong numbers, or the numbers they celebrate will be revised, or they’re fixating on data and not listening to the words describing life behind the numbers. Rosenberg isn’t above a little trash talk. “I wouldn’t be surprised that the economists who threw in the towel on the recession will use that towel to wipe the egg off their faces,” he quips.

Rosenberg insists that most of the country’s economy is contracting or on the verge. Danielle DiMartino Booth, founder and CEO of QI Research, is certain the national recession has already begun. SMBC Nikko Securities’ chief economist Joseph LaVorgna says although his “confidence wanes with every job created,” he’s still in the recession camp. And billionaire bond king Jeffrey Gundlach, founder and CEO of DoubleLine, has been spreading the word that the storm clouds of economic contraction are gathering.

Here are 13 reasons why.

Gross domestic product measures everything produced in the country. Gross domestic income tracks everything earned. Rosenberg says nominal GDP growth last year was 6%, but GDI was -7%. Never in recent memory has there been a gap so wide between what’s coming in and what’s going out, “but all we talk about is GDP,” Rosenberg says.

Jason Furman, who’s predicting no recession, acknowledges this is true. “Soft landings do precede recessions,” Furman, a Harvard professor who was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama White House, tells Forbes. “Of course, if we get a recession this spring, we’ll look back at this time and say it was a hard landing.”

Two-thirds of GDP growth last year came from pandemic checks, Rosenberg says. “That gave GDP numbers a false glow. That won’t be a recurring factor in 2024.”

In 2021, the percentage of Americans late on loan payments was the lowest maybe ever (the data doesn’t go back very far). Thank you, Uncle Sam. But now those numbers are climbing past pre-pandemic levels, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. For instance, 2.2% of Americans’ credit card debt was more than two months past due in the third quarter of 2023, up from 1.9% in the same period in 2019, the Philadelphia Fed reports.

This is playing out like a horror movie. In the first scene, Covid clears office buildings. Cut to an interior shot of office workers getting cozy on their sofas with their laptops. Pan out to $544 billion of commercial mortgages coming due in 2024 and another $533 billion next year, according to data provider Trepp. Fitch Ratings warns that commercial mortgage delinquencies will double to 4.5% this year. Maybe that’s not enough to trigger a recession, but it doesn’t bode well for regional banks, whom Trepp says hold more than half the loans coming due between now and 2029.

Just ask New York Community Bancorp. Last week, after posting a fourth-quarter loss, cutting its dividend by nearly two-thirds and telling investors it was socking away cash to cover future commercial real estate losses, shares fell as much as 38%. That shaved 6% off the KBW Regional Bank Index, its largest one-day decline since Signature Bank was shuttered last March. New York Community Bancorp now owns Signature’s assets.

The next deadline for a potential government shutdown over funding is in early March.

When investors can get higher returns from short-term Treasury notes (say, two years to maturity) than they do for longer-term bonds (in this case, a ten-year), weird things happen, like the Detroit Lions winning playoff games.

An inverted yield curve “is never a good sign,” says the bullish Richard Bernstein, founder and CEO of Richard Bernstein Advisors in New York. When the curve inverts, the costs of lending can get so high that banks won’t make loans, slowing the economy.

The yield curve first inverted in July 2022, meaning that if it persists into March, it will set a record for the longest IYC in history, according to LaVorgna, who was an economic advisor in the Trump White House.

The IYC has a perfect record of foretelling recessions, at least until now, which presents LaVorgna with something of an existential dilemma. “The yield curve is an excellent historic metric, maybe the best,” he tells Forbes. “This [year] will prove if the yield curve still matters.”

Rosenberg: “To say that the recession isn’t coming because it hasn’t arrived yet is like being in Minneapolis in December and there’s no snow and you predict that there won’t be any winter.”

Last week, the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average both hit record highs. “I think the markets are in a euphoria type of period right now,” Gundlach recently told Fox Business News. “I worry about that.”

The Conference Board’s Index of Leading Economic Indicators “continues to signal recession,” the organization said January 22. The index followed a 4.3% decline in the first six months of 2023 with a 2.9% contraction between June and December.

MicroEdge, which tracks job cuts announced on companies’ quarterly earnings calls, says 103,500 heads rolled in January. DiMartino Booth says that most states saw net job losses in October, and that recession monitors will inevitably calculate that the contraction began that month. “I think one of the themes of 2024 will be layoffs,” Gundlach says.

Rosenberg: “Late spring, early summer is where the bullseye shows up.”

Here’s the really worrying part. It comes from Furman, the Obama White House advisor, who sees growth and not recession this year. “Nothing the pessimists have told you is crazy,” he says. “It could happen.”