Recession Fears: Biden Reprises His Discredited Inflation Script As Economy Teeters

President Joe Biden downplayed the serious concerns of economists regarding an imminent recession, seemingly echoing the same attitude he exhibited more than a year ago when he said inflation would be "temporary."

"I don't think there will be a recession. If it is, it will be a very slight recession. That is, we'll move down slightly," the U.S. president told CNN's Jake Tapper in an interview published Tuesday. Biden reiterated that while he believes a recession is "possible," he doesn't "anticipate" it coming.

Biden further explained that "so much has been accomplished" in terms of the government acting on inflation and other economy-related issues. For the president, there is "no guarantee" a recession will actually take place.

The comments come on the heels of warnings from economic experts about the U.S. and the world economy's future.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon predicted that the Ukraine war, inflation issues, monetary policies that restrict the Fed's balance sheet, and interest rate hikes are "likely to put the U.S. in some kind of recession six to nine months from now."

In his CNN interview, Biden alluded to Dimon's warnings, arguing that "every six months they say this" but the predictions "hadn't happened yet."

Before the Biden interview went public, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned Tuesday of a possible global recession, citing the "intensified" slowdown of the global economy.

"Markets have been extremely volatile," the director of monetary and capital departments at IMF, Tobias Adrian said during a media briefing Tuesday.

As a result of the IMF's expectations that major economies will be stalled in the coming months, the IMF cut its 2023 global growth forecast to 2.7 percent from its initial 2.9 percent in July.

In late September, the Bank of England warned that the United Kingdom may already be experiencing a recession after it hiked interest rates from 1.75% to 2.25%. At the time, BBC reported that inflation was at its highest rate in almost four decades.

On Tuesday, the bank announced that it will expand its bond market intervention as part of the efforts to further address the "dysfunction" in the British bonds market.

In China, which is the world's second-largest consumer of oil, analysts are raising concerns about the pressures in the oil market which are being triggered by Beijing's tightened COVID-related curbs after the coronavirus returned to haunt its origin country.

Supply chain disruptions continue across various industries. "The risks are accumulating," IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said Tuesday, as reported by The New York Times. Gourinchas added that the IMF is expecting "about a third of the global economy to be in a technical recession."

This is not the first time the president downplayed economic fears. In July 2021, Biden said the increase in prices in the U.S. was "temporary," but earlier this year, economy experts questioned the president's belief in transitory inflation.

"I just think they miscalculated," a former federal official told CNBC at the time, referring to how U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said inflation was "transitory" in 2021. Other sources told the outlet that the Fed had a lot of influence on the Biden administration's decisions regarding the U.S. economy. Yellen has since admitted she was "wrong" about downplaying the inflation issue last year.

The U.S. consumer price report for September is due Thursday, but analysts are still worried about inflation and how it will affect spending during the holidays.

Inflation remains high, economists noted, with U.S. stocks tumbling upon hearing the news that inflation was at 8.3% in August. Analysts said most goods and services are still priced much higher than in 2021.