Ben Bernanke: The US Economy Is Going to Go off The Cliff in 2020

The comments below are an edited and abridged synopsis of an article by Tyler Durden

Bridgewater co-CIO Greg Jensen has warned that the world’s biggest hedge fund has an ominous appraisal of the current economic and financial situation facing the US.

Now, former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has repeated the same assessment in his own dire outlook on the economy.

Bernanke echoed Bridgewater’s biggest concern about the US economy for the next 18 months, saying that the stimulative effect from Trump’s $1+ trillion fiscal stimulus makes the Fed’s job more difficult; it also means that the more supercharged the economy, the greater the fall.

Bernanke blamed Congress for not doing enough to jumpstart the economy during his time in office; now, 3 years later, he is blaming the president and Congress for doing too much.

The real reason for the upcoming collapse has little to do with Trump, whose $1 trillion stimulus is a drop in the bucket compared to the doubling of the US debt under the previous administration, and the $20-trillion liquidity injection by Bernanke and the central bank since the financial crisis.

Contradicting his successor Janet Yellen, who said after leaving office that she believes there won’t be another financial crisis in her lifetime, Bernanke predicts that the US economy will nosedive in 2 years.

Growth is projected to slow to 1.8% in 2020; meanwhile, the Fed believes Trump’s stimulus will cause the economy to overheat and push inflation past the central bank’s 2% target, prompting the Fed to hike rates much as 4%.

When Trump was campaigning, he said the US economy was a big bubble being propped up by the Fed’s low interest rates. Now, the Fed says it’s a big bubble propped up by the POTUS tax cuts.