STORY: Fueling Yellen's optimism: a red hot labor market, which is producing hundreds of thousands of new jobs a month.

Yellen told ABC's Good Morning America, “you don't have a recession when you have 500,000 jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years. So what I see is a path in which inflation is declining significantly and the economy is remaining strong.”

But Mahn noted that "the economy has already met the technical definition of a recession during the first half of 2022 - that being two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth."

Mahn added that the consumer is "now starting to show signs of weakness" - important because "the consumer accounts for 70% of GDP growth in our country - so if they start to spend less, ultimately that's going to cause an economic slowdown."