Trump warns of new ‘Great Depression’
Former US President Donald Trump has warned that the national economy will completely collapse if he does not return to the White House next year. He described the grim scenario in a post on his Truth Social platform on Friday.
“The stock market is only high because people… expect me to win the presidential election of 2024,” Trump wrote in all caps. “If I don’t win, it is my prediction that we will have a stock market ‘crash’ worse than that of 1929 – a Great Depression!!!”
“The only thing that is keeping the economy ‘alive’ is the fumes of what we accomplished during the Trump administration,” he stated. He added that, under President Joe Biden’s watch, high inflation has “totally destroyed the buying power of the consumer.”
Trump argued that the Biden administration’s official inflation statistics, which show prices have risen by about 17% since his inauguration in 2021, were underestimating the real figure by nearly half, referencing an older method of measuring the phenomenon that placed it over 30%. Inflation surged to a 40-year high under Biden, though it has since declined.
The 1929 stock market crash kicked off an economic death spiral that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average lose 89% of its value over three years, a slump it would not fully recover from until two decades later after World War II helped boost the recovery of the US economy. The crash was triggered by several factors, including rampant speculation and Federal Reserve rate hikes.
Biden’s approval rating among prospective voters has plumbed new depths over the last month. A recent Monmouth University poll found just 34% of voters viewed his performance favorably.
Despite the insistence of the White House that the nation’s finances are robust and healthy, credit card debt among US consumers hit a historic high last month, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and JP Morgan analysts revealed earlier this month that any extra savings Americans had accumulated during the Covid-19 pandemic had been wiped out for all but 1% of the population.
A survey conducted in May found nearly four in ten Americans lacked enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense. At the same time, the S&P 500 is approaching an all-time high, and the Dow Jones recently broke its own record.
