The economy may have stuck the soft landing. Nobody wants to jinx it.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The vital signs of the American economy are pointing in the same, favorable direction more convincingly than at any point since before the pandemic. Inflation is falling.

The labor market is holding. Growth has been solid. It is a snapshot, not a verdict—but it is the closest the economy has come to achieving a soft landing, a moderation in inflation without recession.

Just four years ago, many economists said that was impossible. This past April, as the economy closed in on a soft landing, steep tariffs had forecasters bracing for a new surge in inflation. Now, it again looks plausible that inflation could return to the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal without a recession.

Friday’s inflation report showed so-called core prices, which strip out volatile food and energy costs, rose 2.5% in January from a year earlier—the lowest since the pandemic price surge began in 2021. While that number has been held down artificially by a data gap from last fall’s government shutdown, it nonetheless showed less of the start-of-the-year price pressure that tripped up the falling-inflation story in each of the past three years. Meanwhile, separate data Wednesday showed the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3% in January, with employers adding a larger-than-anticipated 130,000 jobs.

“The worst calamity that everyone had in mind didn’t happen," said Jeffrey Cleveland, chief economist at Payden & Rygel. “People would say to me, ‘The only way you’ll get to 2% inflation is the unemployment rate has to spike.’" Even if oxygen masks weren’t needed, it is too soon to remove the seat belts. Core prices as measured by the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, which differs from the consumer-price index released Friday,