As many within the Democratic Party begin to turn away from President Joe Biden, we are beginning to see the bigger picture as to how this “safe bet” Commander in Chief has failed so thoroughly: It’s hi reluctance.
Biden didn’t even really want to be President, or at least he truly didn’t act like it. He had to be goaded into the race by a party who was hoping he’d steal some midwestern, moderate voters from Donald Trump on account of the former NYC business mogul’s behavior.
And so now that Biden is in the White House, he has been reluctant to act as well, allowing a number of well-understood crises fester and mutate.
This week, long after a glut of economic experts began sounding their alarms, Biden’s Federal Reserve Chair finally got with the program, proving that this reluctance is contagious.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell conceded on Wednesday that the Federal Reserve’s battle to bring down inflation could trigger a recession.
“It’s certainly a possibility,” Mr. Powell said Wednesday during the first of two days of congressional hearings. “We are not trying to provoke and do not think we will need to provoke a recession, but we do think it’s absolutely essential” to tame inflation.
Inflation has been running at the highest rate in 40 years and has proven to be more widespread and more persistent than Fed officials initially thought. Past episodes in which the Fed tightened monetary policy to tame inflation have typically resulted in a recession. Hopes that the outcome could be different thins time—that the Fed might achieve a so-called “soft landing”—have been fading among experts.
Other experts had some stronger opinions on the matter.
In an op-ed for Bloomberg, former New York Fed chief Bill Dudley wrote that a recession is “inevitable.’
“If you’re still holding out hope that the Federal Reserve will be able to engineer a soft landing in the US economy, abandon it,” Dudley wrote. “A recession is inevitable within the next 12 to 18 months.”
This obliviousness does not likely bode well for Americans, who are already very much feeling the squeeze of an economy on the brink of serious trouble.
