Joe Biden’s next economic crisis: A recession? | American Enterprise Institute
By Desmond Lachman
Are Joe Biden’s policies creating the conditions for a recession? Today’s very strong labor market numbers do not bode well for President Biden’s prospects in this November’s mid-term elections.
By confirming Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s characterization of the labor market as “tight to an unhealthy degree”, today’s employment numbers leave the Fed with little option but to slam on the monetary policy brakes to get the inflation genie back into the bottle. That in turn risks precipitating an economic recession in the run-up to November’s election.
The excessive strength in the labor market needs to be seen in the context of today’s high inflation rate. It is not only that consumer price inflation has risen to almost 8 percent or to a forty-year high. It is also that Russia’s Ukrainian invasion and China’s Covid-induced lockdown of a number of major cities threaten to…
