As things have turned out, fears of a sharp slump have not been realised. On the contrary, as of May 2002, it seems that the US has begun to recover from what now appears to have been the shallowest recession in recent history, at least as measured by the behaviour of GDP.
Using the metric of unemployment, if it wasn’t the shallowest recession in recent times, it was close. This is a better outcome than most thought likely during the second half of last year, and is much better than the “downside risk” scenarios which were contemplated at that time.