When it comes to the U.S. economy, Jeremy Grantham, chief investment strategist at money manager GMO, can't be called an optimist.

He sees GDP growth of 1.5 percent going forward, compared to an average rate of 3.2 percent since 1948. The economy shrank 0.2 percent in the first quarter, and the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank's forecasting model puts growth at 2.4 percent for the second quarter.

Grantham, writing in GMO's quarterly commentary, cites several problems facing the economy.

• "The age of plentiful, cheap resources is gone forever." Oil is a particular problem, he says.
• "Climate Problems." He means that dreaded global warning.
• "Income inequality." The middle class and poor are getting poorer.
• "Deficiencies in the Fed: a counter-productive job description, badly executed." The Fed's job description, of course, is to boost employment and control inflation.
• "Investment bubbles in a world that is, this time, interestingly different." The differences: "profit margins in the U.S. seem to have stopped mean reverting in the old, normal way, and some real estate markets have bubbled up and then stayed there."

Elsewhere on the economic front, Edward Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, says the next recession may not come until March 2019. That's based on the movement of the Index of Coincident Economic Indicators (CEI) over the past five business cycles, he explains in a commentary provided to Newsmax Finance.

"It has taken 68 months — from January 2008 through October 2013 — for the CEI to fully recover from its severe decline during 2008 and early 2009," he writes. The average time for a full recovery in the last five cycles was 26 months, with a range of 19-33 months.

"The good news is that the average increase in the CEI following each of those recovery periods through the next peak was 18.6 percent," with an average period of 65 months and a range of 30 to 104 months, Yardeni says.

"If we apply this average to the current cycle, then the CEI would peak in 45 more months, during March 2019, with a substantial gain from here."

The last economic-growth period lasted from 2001-2007, and the current one began in 2009.

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