‘Mea Culpa!’ Fox’s Larry Kudlow Admits He Was Wrong to Predict a Recession — Or Even a Slowdown
Fox Business host and former Trump White House economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, offered an earnest “mea culpa” on Thursday for having predicted a looming recession – or even a slowdown.
“Sandra Smith, so you’re writing, texting me early in the morning, and all kinds of bad news. You know, I was kind of,” Kudlow began as Smith jumped in.
“Who else am I going to talk to about the economy?” Smith joked.
“I mean, my, mea culpa!” Kudlow replied, “I was wrong about the slowdown and the recession.”
“I think don’t think you were wrong,” offered Smith encouragingly.
“So was the entire forecasting fraternity. Well, the Fed, everyone was wrong. Ok. But you mentioned all these job layoffs. Tomorrow is the jobs numbers,” Kudlow continued, adding:
About the month of January alone. This is from Challenger, Gray. Total jobs lost 82,307. Finance jobs lost 23,000, tech jobs lost 15,000, food-producing jobs lost, and in general, other surveys have shown the same thing. In fact, one survey shows in tech overall last year lost 260,000 jobs. Now I say it and I think the spirit you sent it to me. Unemployment remains low and most of these monthly job gains are pretty good. So what’s up with these layoffs?
“So how else do you fix inflation? Right?” replied Smith, getting to the meat of the discussion.
“This is the Fed’s goal, right? You have to you see a drag on the economy before prices can come down. My guess is that the Federal Reserve is looking more closely at that than inflation. You know, if the labor market takes a significant hit, we could see a significant downturn in the American economy. As far as why is the unemployment rate [low]? You know, there’s a lot of other factors that go into the unemployment number,” she concluded.
As the conversation continued, Smith and Kudlow agreed that rising unemployment was a number to watch as the Fed continues to work to bring down inflation.
Watch the clip above from Fox Business Network.
