Biden Election Disaster: Banking Giant Warns of 2024 Devastation - Americans' Excess Savings Mostly Spent by Oct.
As consumers run out of cash, the economy is likely to sputter its way into hard economic times, according to a major bank’s leading economist.
In predicting a 100 percent chance of a recession, David Folkerts-Landau, Deutsche Bank’s chief economist, wrote, “The U.S. is heading for its first genuine policy-led boom-bust cycle in at least four decades,” USA Today reported Thursday.
“The inflation we see was induced largely by expansive fiscal and monetary policy, and the aggressive rate hikes needed to tame that have now materialized. Avoiding a hard landing would be historically unprecedented,” he wrote.
Folkerts-Landau said the Federal Reserve’s continual battle to reduce inflation while not tipping the economy into a free fall has not fully been successful. Although inflation is going down, unemployment is rising, with a prediction that it will jump from 3.7 percent in May to 4.5 percent for the first three months of 2024, a presidential election year.
He also said that by October, excess savings that many Americans built up during the pandemic will be gone, leading to a retrenchment in consumer spending.
Folkerts-Landau said a “moderate recession” will begin in the final three months of 2023 and carry through the first three months of 2024.
That could hurt President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
Deep recession … massive electoral chaos.
Very difficult for Joe Biden to win. His approval numbers are already low in 37% to 40% range. With a deep recession, his numbers will get worse.
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) June 15, 2023
Folkerts-Landau isn’t alone in forecasting dark times ahead.
Darrel Cronk, president of Wells Fargo Investment Institute, said that “recession is at our doorstep,” Fortune reported Friday.
“Much of the manufacturing sector of the economy is already in recessionary territory,” Cronk said.
Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, senior manager of Business Cycle Indicators at The Conference Board, said recent data indicate “a worsening economic outlook,” saying that “weaknesses among underlying components were widespread.”
Republican Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri said Thursday that Biden’s economic policies are to blame for the nation’s economic malaise.
“President Biden’s reckless actions have put the Federal Reserve between a rock and hard place,” he said in a statement in a news release on the website of the House Ways and Means Committee. “The Fed is having to choose between hiking interest rates to combat the inflation crisis caused by reckless Democrat spending, risking the health of our overall economy, or pausing those rate hikes and hoping prices do not continue to spiral out of control.
“Even with a pause in interest rate increases, Americans are already paying more to get a loan or afford a mortgage while the inflation crisis continues to rob them of their hard-earned dollars.”
Many consumers are already cutting back, a recent CNBC/Morning Consult survey found.
The survey showed 92 percent of Americans with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 a year are either “somewhat” or “very” worried about higher prices.
Eighty percent of respondents said they had cut back on non-essential items, while about two-thirds said they were reducing their costs for essentials by trying to get cheaper alternatives to their usual brands.
Looking ahead, the survey found shoppers planning to cut even more, with 77 percent saying they will further trim what is spent on non-discretionary items.
Clothing topped the list of non-essential items where shoppers are spending less, with 63 percent of those responding saying they are buying less since the start of the year.
The online survey of more than 4,400 adults was conducted earlier this month. No margin of error was provided.
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