Stock market woes raise a nagging fear: Is a recession near?

Fears of a recession have been mounting with the U.S. stock market appearing to be headed for its worst December since 1931 – during the Great Depression.

Wall Street’s sustained slump has been fueled by investor concerns about lower corporate profits, higher corporate debt, a festering trade war between the United States and China and a broader global slowdown.

And the worries are mounting. On Wednesday, stocks tumbled over concerns that the Federal Reserve will continue raising rates. And they plunged again Thursday as President Donald Trump appeared open to a partial government shutdown unless he receives funding for a wall along the border with Mexico.

So is a U.S. recession imminent?

Not necessarily.

Plenty of economic gauges suggest that far from being derailed by a stock market that’s set to suffer its first annual loss in a decade, the $20 trillion U.S. economy is barreling forward. Employers are hiring, consumers are spending ahead of the holidays and economic growth has been brisk, thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s deficit-financed tax cuts.

But the economy has been growing since mid-2009 and nothing – not even what’s become the second-longest U.S. expansion on record – lasts forever. As the expansion has aged, economists and business leaders are increasingly predicting that it will end within the next two years.

The fact is that recessions are a regular part of the economic cycle. A downturn won’t necessarily happen in 2019. But the free-fall in stock prices could hasten the day. After Wednesday’s sell-off, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 400 points, bringing its losses since Friday to more than 1,600 points..

“While we aren’t explicitly forecasting a recession next year, we wouldn’t rule out a mild one,” said John Higgins, chief markets economist of Capital Economics. “At the least, we expect a significant economic slowdown.”

Nearly half the chief financial officers surveyed by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business foresee a recession by the end of next year. And by the end of 2020, 82 percent do so.

Here’s a look at how the movements of the stock market and the barometers of the economy might determine the risks of a recession.