"No One Understands Global Economy Better Than I Do"! Tesla CEO Musk Warns of Severe Recession Looming Large

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is not an economist, so his critics often say that when it comes to evaluating the health of the global and US economies, Musk's opinions are not of much reference value.

However, Musk himself obviously doesn't think so - in the latest series of tweets released last Sunday, the world-renowned billionaire believes that as a business owner with many global cutting-edge technology companies, he is fully capable of accurately assessing the temperature and pulse of the global economy...

"Between Tesla, Starlink and Twitter, I alone have probably more real-time global economic data than anyone else," the billionaire wrote in a series of tweets on Sunday local time.

Compared with the Fed, Musk believes that the data he has is the "real-time picture" of the economic situation, which gives him a better understanding of what is really happening in the economic field at the moment.

In fact, the world's most famous billionaire has been very dissatisfied with the Fed's monetary policy for the past few months. The Fed has been raising interest rates aggressively since last March in an attempt to curb high inflation facing consumers and businesses. But economists and business leaders, including Musk, have warned that the historically rare tightening will weaken the economy and could lead to a recession.

In Musk's view, if the Fed continues to raise interest rates, the economy, which is already in a "slight recession," will experience a "severe recession." He made the prediction following a tweet from Larry Summers, a Harvard economist and former US Treasury secretary.

Summers wrote in a tweet on April 29, "If the Fed continues to tighten measures to curb inflation, I expect an economic slowdown may come. I think there's a pretty good chance of that happening sometime in the next 12 months, maybe 70%. "

Musk replied to this, saying, “There is too much delay in the Fed’s data, and a mild recession has already occurred.”

To make his point, Musk argued that the banking crisis was a sign that an economic slowdown had begun.

Further rate hikes will trigger a deep recession - mark my words," Musk wrote.

In a sense, Musk's above-mentioned views are actually not unreasonable. Even Fed officials often have to admit that official macroeconomic data often have a certain lag, while high-frequency indicators of certain industries or the private sector in the market, on the contrary, can often capture the economic performance more keenly. Subtle changes.

Musk mentioned Tesla, Starlink and Twitter under his control in the tweet. Indeed, as the largest electric car maker in the United States, demand trends for Tesla vehicles can also roughly reflect consumer spending to a certain extent.

Not to mention Twitter, the change of hot words on major social media is often an area of concern to economists, which can often more intuitively reflect people's true emotions. And given that most of the social media platform's revenue comes from advertisers, changes in corporate advertising spending may also reflect the operating conditions of the company's fundamentals.

Brian Bethune, an economics professor at Boston College, said recently that he thinks U.S. inflation is cooling enough to give the Fed a pause in rate hikes. "If I were a member of the FOMC, I would vote for an immediate pause in rate hikes. There is a certain possibility that the Fed has tightened too much. "

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