President Donald Trump, in an interview aired on Sunday, refused to control the possibility that the United States could enter the recession this year.
“I hate predicting such things,” he told a Fox News Interviewer when asked directly about a possible recession in 2025.
He said, “There is a period of infection, because what we are doing is too big – we are bringing the wealth back to America,” he said, “It takes some time.”
But Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnik, was more sure when asked about the possibility of recession on Sunday.
“Not at all,” he told NBC’s “Meat the Press” when asked if Americans should brace for recession.
Trump again against Canada, Mexico, China and others, again tariff hazards have left the US financial markets in turmoil and consumers are uncertain what the year can bring.
The stock markets ended their worst week since the November elections.
Consumer trust measures are below, as shopkeepers – already dumped from years of inflation – the brace for high prices that can bring tariffs.
And there is more concern for the broad government retrenchment being engineered by Trump’s billionaire advisor Elon Musk.
Some signs are mixed.
A widely observed Atlanta Federal Reserve Index now predicts 2.4 percent of the actual contraction of the actual GDP growth in the first quarter of the year, which will be the worst result since the height of the Kovid -19 epidemic.
Most of the uncertainty from Trump’s shifting tariff policy – effective dates have changed, as sectors are being targeted – because business and investors will try to find out what will come next.
Trump’s Chief Economic Advisor Kevin Haset was asked on ABC whether tariffs were primarily temporary or permanent.
Haset said that it depended on the behavior of targeted countries. If they fail to give positive response, they said, the results can be a “new balance” of the ongoing tariff.
The administration has insisted that while the economy possibly goes through bumpy “infection”, things are in a positive direction.
In his State of the Union Message on Tuesday, Trump told the Americans that they expect a “slight disturbance” because they catch the tariff, while adding: “We are fine with it. It’s not much.”
And his Treasury Secretary Scott Besant has warned of “detox period” as the economy cuts the government’s expenses.
Given uncertainty, economists have been careful of making strong predictions.
Economists of Goldman Sachs have increased the possibility of recession by 15 percent to 20 percent in the next 12 months, citing Trump’s policies.
And Morgan Stanley predicted “soft growth this year” compared to earlier.
The recession is usually defined as two consecutive quarters of weak or negative GDP growth.
In the beginning of 2020, the US had a brief recession to the Kovid epidemic. Millions of people lost their jobs.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
