The economic expansion that has been underway in the United States since 2009 is getting old, and soon will die.

At least that’s the conclusion you would reach from various news media prognostications about the economic environment the next president will face.

“The next president will likely face a recession,” said a CNN headline. “Recession May Loom for Next U.S. President No Matter Who That Is,” said a Bloomberg headline in May. New York magazine was at least generous enough to frame the coming recession in the Clinton or Trump administration as an open question.

These prognostications could turn out to be right, of course. The economy faces all sorts of risks and threats, any of which could lead to a contraction. But the fact that the current expansion is more than seven years old — “long in the tooth,” as commentators have often observed — reveals almost nothing about the likelihood of a contraction during the coming four years. The idea that it would happen is rooted in a faulty metaphor, and isn’t backed by modern economic history.