If everyone thinks there's going to be a recession, wouldn't that mean that would be priced into the IPO price? ie. if you think that there's going to be a recession in 3 months, you wouldn't plow a boatload of money into an IPO.
High information investors and executives know an impending recession is probable, but low information investors will still happily plow money into IPOs.
Predicting the exact timing of a recession is very hard to do. You can say there are troubling signs but I would be extremely skeptical of somebody telling me "Winter/2020" with a high degree of confidence. Meanwhile, there have been people pointing out troubling signs for several years now, and if you acted on their advice you'd have lost money, but nobody could have told you that for sure at the time, either.
