The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that a soft landing for the economy has gone from a faint hope to a strong possibility, particularly in the United States. The Globe's Ian McGugan writes that only six months ago, most economists expected the U.S. to slide into a downturn over the coming year. Now the consensus calls for no recession. Investors may want to start thinking about a scenario in which good news outweighs bad. In fact, they may want to start thinking about what would be a true shock -- the possibility that everything from the 2008 financial crisis onward was largely a bad dream from which we are just now waking up. This is the position of Jan Hatzius and his economics group at Goldman Sachs. In recent notes, they argue "the hard part is over" and predict that 2024 will demonstrate that the global economy has at long last escaped the environment of wealth-destroying bond yields that has prevailed since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. "The upside of this Great Escape is that the investing environment now looks more normal than it has at any point" since 2008, they write. Investors, they say, can expect "firmly positive" returns even after accounting for the bite of inflation.