Read what the experts have to say:
Trump is driving us toward a big recession: It will be ghastly
Trump is driving us toward a big recession: It will be ghastly
- Bloomberg, last week, published an alarming story featuring this lede: “The latest eruption in the U.S.-China trade dispute pushed a widely watched Treasury-market recession indicator to the highest alert since 2007.” Experts are directly linking Trump’s trade war with the threat of another recession. Yields on 10-year bonds fell by the largest amount “since the lead-up to the 2008 crisis.” Indeed, it was a drop in yields, nearing an all-time low, that led to Monday’s 400-point stock market decline.
- Bank of America forecasted that the chance of recession within the next 12 months has risen to around 30 percent. This week, Morgan Stanley forecasted a recession in early 2020, due to the trade war. Goldman Sachs is saying the same. That’d be all Trump.
- The Wall Street Journal reported this week that middle-class debt is skyrocketing again. “Unsecured loans are back in vogue,” according to the report. Student debt, auto debt and housing debt are on the rise, too. In fact, in the first quarter of 2019, 5.7 percent of personal income was used to finance debt — the same level as 2009, when unemployment was nearly 10 percent.
- Elsewhere, GDP remains roughly where it was under Obama. Returning to Trump’s inaugural framing of the Obama economy as “American carnage,” it’s worth noting that average GDP growth in 2018 was 2.9 percent, the exact same number as the 2015 average under Obama. If that was carnage, what the hell’s this?
- Germane to the aftermath of a forthcoming recession is the fact that Trump and the congressional Republican majorities have presided over a spike in the federal budget deficit from $585 billion to a projected $1.1 trillion by the end of 2020. For the sake of contrast, the last Bush-era deficit, for fiscal 2009, was $1.2 trillion. During the Obama stewardship of the economy, the deficit dropped by nearly a trillion dollars. Trump’s 2020 shortfall, however, will essentially return the deficit to where it was during the worst part of the Great Recession, making it nearly impossible to pass any kind of economy-rescuing stimulus should we end up back in a recessionary hole.
