The “soft landing” narrative spent the last two or three months gathering adherents in the US, both in markets and in the financial media.

Resilient consumption, a seemingly bulletproof labor market and receding inflation ostensibly suggest the Fed is on the verge of pulling off the impossible.

Gone (nearly) is any mention of a “hard landing,” and as some analysts have been especially keen to point out, risk assets appear to be pricing in no landing at all.

This isn’t lost on the financial media. Indeed, as Morgan Stanley pointed out in a recent note, the soft landing narrative “has increasingly dominated” the hard landing story.

As you can see from the simple Bloomberg story count charts above, the moving average for “soft landing” mentions is now at an all-time high, while “hard landing” mentions are comparatively scarce.

Of course, the media influences perceptions among market participants, and the price action feeds back into the media narrative. There’s an echo chamber effect, and it also operates within the actual economy. Recall the extent to which “good news” stories about falling inflation and better business conditions are helping to shape consumer sentiment, which in turn influences inflation expectations and spending decisions.

In the same note, Morgan Stanley’s Matthew Hornbach echoed JPMorgan’s strategists in suggesting that “‘soft landing’ may no longer appropriately describe the outcome that markets price today, or what investors really have in mind.”

Instead, the bank remarked, GDP nowcasts including the widely-cited Atlanta Fed model, show growth running “well-above-trend.”

As the figure on the left above shows, we’ve spent precious little time flying in the “soft landing zone,” defined by below-trend, but still positive growth. For the most part, the economy has cruised at higher altitudes.

Why, then, is “no landing” not the dominate narrative? I’d argue that it is. But it’s a new entrant into the lexicon, and thus isn’t as likely to show up in media coverage. But Hornbach posited another explanation: Investors may not actually accept the data at face value given falling response rates (illustrated on the right, above).

The bank mentioned forthcoming revisions to the BLS data and cautioned against “chasing the wrong market narratives.” Investors, Hornbach said, would be well advised not to “jump on the bandwagon thinking that higher equilibrium rates and government bond supply will take yields ever higher.”

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