The paper uses a binary variable approach to forecast economic downturns in the U.S economy. Different from previous publications, we propose a 4-phase view on the business cycle and stress the advantage of finding determinants for the 12-months period prior to the contraction rather than the NBER determined recession dates. Using a probit estimated relationship, we show that probabilities for a recession to begin in a given month are more complicated to calculate than simply using the forecasted left hand side variable of the specification.