Wall Street’s fourth-quarter earnings season that gets under way next week could confirm something many investors may not want to hear: the U.S. economy may be doing well but corporate profits are in a recession. An earnings recession – two quarters of declining profits – would be led by the usual suspects, energy and materials companies. Consumer discretionary companies, which led S&P 500 gains in 2015 and have had the second-highest average profit growth rate of any sector over the last five years, are more pessimistic than usual going into the quarter.