Biden Says: “I don’t believe there will be a recession, if there is, it will be slight”

Despite many banks and analysts predicting a daunting U.S. recession, President Joe Biden claims he doesn’t believe the country will face anything of the sort.

Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview that was aired Tuesday, Biden confirmed that economic projections warning of a recession are periodic, but he doesn’t necessarily agree with the assessment.

“Every six months they say this. Every six months, they look down the next six months and say what’s going to happen,” Biden, 79, told Tapper.

He continued: “It hadn’t happened yet. It hadn’t… I don’t think there will be a recession. If it is, it’ll be a very slight recession. That is, we’ll move down slightly.”

Biden’s words came just one day after JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon forewarned on Monday that a U.S. recession is likely within the next six to nine months.

While Dimon, speaking at a conference in London, said the economy was still doing well, he also cited uncertainty due to factors such as inflation, growing interest rates and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The World Bank has also warned of a “global recession,” and Bank of America recently estimated the country will start losing 175,000 jobs per month after the Federal Reserve worked to squash inflation by aggressively raising interest rates.

So far, the National Bureau of Economic Research has yet to declare that the economy is in an official recession. The Biden administration is also wary of throwing around the “R” word.

Economist Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, pointed to positive economic indicators that she says show the U.S. economy is not in recession, unemployment, for one.

“We know that having low unemployment is the first piece of economic security,” she said, adding that there are other bright spots, like 44 days of consistently falling gas prices in the United States.

According to Boushey, “a slowdown across all our economic indicators” would signal a recession.

“We continue to see strong gains in employment, to the tune of about 375,000 jobs on average [per month] in the last few months. We don’t typically start recessions with that kind of robust job gain,” she said. “It would be highly unusual for the whole economy to be experiencing a downturn while adding so many jobs, month after month.”