Donald Trump on Sunday refused to rule out the possibility that the US economy will head into recession this year and that inflation will rise, as his chaotic trade tariffs policy cause uncertainty and market turbulence.
The US president predicted that his economic goals would take time and a period of transition to bear fruit. But when asked in an interview with the Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures “are you expecting a recession this year?” he demurred.
“I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing. And there are always periods of, it takes a little time. It takes a little time, but I think it should be great for us,” Trump said.
When asked whether he thought his tariffs on US imports would fuel inflation, he said: “You may get it. In the meantime, guess what? Interest rates are down.”
He downplayed recent stock market volatility that followed his ducking and weaving over tariff policy on exports from Canada, Mexico and China and similar threats to other countries, despite his usual fixation with market performance in relation to the politics of the day and an appetite to claim credit when stocks rise on his watch.
“You have to do what’s right,” he said.
Last week the Atlanta Federal Reserve suggested that the US economy is on course to contract in the first quarter, triggering fears a recession could hit the world’s largest economy if weakness persisted and fueling stock market jitters.
In 2018 Trump posted on Twitter, now X, that “trade wars are good, and easy to win”, a view that is not widely shared by financial and economic experts.
On Sunday, however, he was cautious overall after boasting throughout his election campaign of the swift gains his policies would bring for the US economy and ordinary Americans’ finances.
Fox News Sunday Morning Futures anchor Maria Bartiromo introduced the topic of recession by telling Trump “look, I know you inherited a mess”, even though most experts agree that predecessor Joe Biden, a Democrat, left the Republican president a stable economy where inflation, although painfully high for a long time, was continuing to come down and international trading conditions for the US were steady.
Meanwhile, also on Sunday morning, NBC’s Meet the Press TV politics show was interviewing US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick.
He pushed back on concerns that the prospect of Trump’s global tariffs would cause a recession in the US. “Absolutely not,” he said. “There’s going to be no recession in America.”
Lutnick added: “Anybody who bets against Donald Trump, it’s like the same people who thought Donald Trump wasn’t going to win a year ago … you are going to see over the next two years the greatest set of growth coming from America … I would never bet on recession, no chance.”
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