Soft landing
A soft landing is a tightening cycle that brings inflation back to target without tipping the economy into recession — the policy equivalent of a carrier landing in bad weather. The alternative, a hard landing, is a tightening cycle that ends in contraction.
Why it's rare
Tightening works through exactly the channels that produce recessions: higher rates squeeze credit, housing, and hiring. The Fed has engineered arguably only one clean soft landing — 1994–95 under Greenspan — out of more than a dozen post-war hiking cycles.
The 2023–24 test case
The deepest yield-curve inversion since Volcker predicted recession; instead, inflation fell while unemployment stayed low — a soft landing that made the 2023–24 episode the longest curve false alarm on record. This site tracks it as a dedicated episode precisely because it is the counterexample every curve watcher needs to respect.