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A Phil Hall Op-Ed: If you’ve been following the news over the past week, you may have noticed the word “recession” popping up over and over. This is not because we’re in a recession, but it is because some highly prominent financial services executives and economic thought leaders are insisting that President Trump’s tariff policy will push the nation into a recession.

There’s just one slight problem with this negative talk – everyone predicting a Trump recession are professionally and politically at odds with the goals and ideology of the Trump administration. And this runs the risk of creating more economic and political fear than is justified.

I’m not saying that we should not be concerned about how the Trump approach to tariffs is impacting the economy. When the stock market acts like an oscilloscope, it is understandable that we’re in an unsettling environment that we’ve not seen in some time. And, of course, both residential and commercial real estate could experience significant challenges if the economy sours and consumer confidence frays.

My problem is not with the message, but with the messengers. One must question whether those prominent folks who keep insisting a recession is coming are trying to sway public opinion into being afraid for the future rather than offer an honest assessment of where the economy is heading.

The most obvious doom-and-gloom prophet is Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, and a deep-pocketed donor to Democratic candidates. Over the weekend, Dalio ominously declared that “something worse than a recession” would occur due to the Trump tariff policy.

Lest we forget, Dalio has been heavily invested in China for decades and any threat to the Chinese economy is a threat to his fortune. Dalio is so heavily allied with the Chinese government that he unapologetically downplayed the country’s miserable human rights record – and when confronted in 2021 about China’s crackdown on its Uyghur minority, he replied in an interview, “I look at the United States and I say, ‘Well, what’s going on in the United States and should I not invest in the United States because our own human rights issues and other things?’”

Both JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and BlackRock’s Larry Fink are also talking up a Trump-fueled recession-to-come. Both are longtime Democratic donors – Dimon was even courted by his party as a potential presidential candidate – and it is no surprise that they are talking so much about a recession instead of talking about the Ukraine Development Fund, which both companies are backing. That fund aims to raise $15 billion to finance reconstruction projects in Ukraine – it was given the green light by the Biden White House, but the Trump administration has its own plans for a post-war Ukraine that most likely will not involve Dimon and Fink.

Fink was also a major proponent of Environmental Social Governance investing, which fell out of favor with the anti-woke Trump presidency. I doubt Fink is shrugging that failure off with a good-natured chuckle.

Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi is joining the mix, noting the ongoing tariff tumult “will weigh heavily on the US and global economies and likely result in a recession.” Zandi is not only a Democratic donor, but he also testified before Congress on how wonderful the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package would be for the nation – it wasn’t, but that’s another story.

Larry Summers, who was Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and would have been Federal Reserve Chairman under President Obama if the woke brigade didn’t arm-twist Obama into appointing a woman for the job (the lamentable Janet Yellen), is also predicting a recession. He also predicted a Trump presidency could push mortgage rates up to 10% – at last check, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has been in a 12-week decline.

The Wall Street Journal, which has its own issues with Trump – and an even more pronounced dislike for Elon Musk – is fueling the fire with such articles as “Young Women Are Starting to Recession-Proof Their Lives” and “Recession Risk Has Leapt Under Trump, Economists Say.” The latter article was culled from a poll of “64 academic and business economists,” and you know things are sketchy when a multitude of like-minded people need to be brought to together to buttress an argument – remember the denunciation of the Hunter Biden laptop story by 51 members of the intelligence community? In case you are wondering who the “64 academic and business economists,” they were never identified by the Journal.

For the record, a recession has traditionally been defined as at least two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. If you follow that definition, the nation had a recession in 2022 – but the Biden White House and its apologists claimed otherwise, most notably Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen with her bizarre claim, “This is not an economy that’s in recession, but we’re in a period of transition in which growth is slowing.”

In truth, a recession is possible – after all, the economy is cyclical and boom times don’t last forever. But considering the Trump tariff policies are still a work in progress, it is clearly too early to predict their outcome and too reckless to scare people into thinking a recession is upon us.

Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at phil@wrenews.com.