The White House on Monday struggled when asked if Americans should prepare for a recession, trying to avoid a definitive answer.
White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein pointed out that the National Bureau of Economic Research typically weighed unemployment numbers and consumer spending when considering whether to declare that a recession was underway.
“I think we can confidently say based on consumer spending, based on payroll employment based on where the unemployment rate is, I think we can confidently say that these numbers that we are posting are very much inconsistent with a recessionary call given where we are now,” he said.
Bernstein appeared at the White House press briefing to promote the recent decline in gas prices, even though they remain two dollars a gallon higher than when President Joe Biden first took office.
He repeated that the economy was strong, unemployment was still low, and Americans still had “excess savings,” which continued to drive consumer spending.
Bernstein described the economy as “solidly within expansion.”
When asked by a reporter if he would regret saying the United States was not entering a recession, he quickly clarified he was not saying that.
“I want to be very clear what I’m saying… I think we can confidently say that these numbers that we are posting are very inconsistent with a recessionary call given where we are right now,” he said.
Bernstein also defended the White House’s use of the phrase “transitory” to describe inflation a year ago, as high inflation rates have continued to expand into 2022.
“The lack of specificity about the cadence that was implied by that word, the temporal cadence implied by that word, led to a level of ambiguity that wasn’t serving the debate very well,” he said.
Bernstein also argued that at the time they cited other economic predictions about inflation, not their own estimates.
“We were careful when we were talking about that to consistently reference forecasts that were out there,” he said.