Trump’s Election Prompts Local Economic Forecasters to Boost Odds for Recession

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Donald Trump’s election as president has caused Los Angeles consulting firm Beacon Economics to revise its national forecast to include an increased probability of a national recession.

In the firm’s revised forecast issued Thursday, Beacon Economics’ founding partner Christopher Thornberg and Economic Research Director Robert Kleinhenz say Trump’s election scrambled their original forecast, which was based on the widely predicted outcome of a Hillary Clinton victory and the presumption that she would mostly continue the policies of the Obama administration.

“The outcome of Tuesday’s election changes our outlook. … How the outlook changes will depend greatly on what happens in the first few months of the Trump administration,” Thornberg and Kleinhenz say in the forecast.

Thornberg was one of the few economists to correctly predict the housing crash and resulting financial crisis a decade ago.

“What we do know is that the potential upsides are limited and the potential downsides are enormous – to the point that there is now a very real probability of a recession over the next two years,” the report says.

After describing the current slow-growth economic environment, Thornberg and Kleinhenz said Trump’s policies as stated during the campaign could wreak havoc. They singled out his pledge to pull the country out of trade agreements and his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

Any one of these policies, they said, could tip the economy into recession.

“Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump has promised to enact numerous policies to ‘fix’ the economy,” the report says. “And this is where the danger starts – as his populist agenda is full of dangerously simplistic ideas rather than sober assessments of feasible policy choices. … In short, the election of Donald Trump represents a serious threat to the current health of the U.S. economy.”

Public policy and energy reporter Howard Fine can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @howardafine.

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