I & I Editorial Board“We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.” – Paul Krugman, November 2016
“Joe Biden will eventually preside over a soaring, ‘morning in America’-type recovery.” – Paul Krugman, November 2020.
“Slower growth is certain. For 2025, I see little or no GDP growth, rising unemployment, and persistent inflation.” – Paul Krugmann, May 2025
If you want an accurate gauge of future economic conditions, look no further than Paul “Nobel-Prize-Winning-Economist” Krugman. He has a solid record of being exactly wrong, as the above quotations show.
So, the fact that he is now predicting stagflation should give everyone a boost of confidence that we are headed for a second Trump boom.
Krugman’s new prediction comes, in fact, just as signs are looking up.
The stock market is back in positive territory since President Donald Trump took office, and is up 7% compared with a year ago.
April’s jobs report beat expectations, with the economy adding 177,000 jobs. (Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics admitted that roughly 600,000 jobs Biden claimed to have created during his last year in office were fake.)
The latest inflation number came in below expectations, with April’s 2.3% reading the lowest since … wait for it … February 2021. (That was before Biden signed his $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” into law. You know, the plan that always-wrong Krugman said would never spark a massive inflationary spike.)
Meanwhile, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow has the economy gaining 2.4% this quarter, after taking a very slight dip in the first quarter.
And federal revenues are up 9% so far this year, despite “expert” predictions that there’d be a massive falloff in tax payments. (See “Epic Narrative Fail: Federal Revenue Surges 9% Despite Predictions Of Decline.”)
JP Morgan now says the probability of a recession has fallen below 50%.
Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, says “Trump’s willingness to de-escalate, willingness to pivot, and the resilience of the economy suggest that the U.S. can avoid the worst,” pointing to Trump’s course correction on tariffs.
To be sure, Krugman is hardly the only one predicting a Trump recession. Democrats and their handmaidens in the press, along with partisan hacks like Krugman, have been tripping over themselves with doom-and-gloom predictions since Trump won the election in 2024, just as they did in Trump’s first term. (We’re old enough to remember when such vitriol was attacked as “talking down the economy.”)
It’s also true that there’s no telling what will happen over the next year. Trump’s seemingly ad-hoc tariff campaign is still a drag on economic growth. Republicans could fail to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which would be catastrophic. Some other calamity could occur.
But we are willing to ignore those warning signs as long as Krugman keeps predicting disaster.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
See Also:
The Nobel Foundation Should Ask Paul Krugman For Its Award Back
Hold On To Your Wallets — ‘Wrong Way’ Krugman Says Inflation Will Soon Ease
Krugman’s Accounting Of The National Debt Is Criminal
Unleash Prosperity
Good for you for this article. Two Americans are notorious for their public successes and awards without ever being right about a thing in their careers: Joe Biden and Paul Krugman.
Among auguring economists, there is a favorite word: “unexpectedly”. Its frequent use signals that they are only human, after all, and therefore entitled not to be exactly on the mark every time.
What does it say about such economists that the real-world results are always, almost without fail, “unexpected”?
I have relied upon Paul “Wrong-Way” Krugman for his advice on what will NOT happen, and done the opposite. He’s the best wrong-way indicator I’ve witnessed in real time.
The photo with the column-at the top-shows a man looking weary and depressed. I assume it’s a photo of Paul Krugman.
He looks as if he just read a copy of his predictions.
Biden, as a politician, was elected again and again; proving that many voters can be deceived often, which we see countless times by false and shallow people like Biden, but private firms paying for someone who is wrong and misguided so often? That is a mystery. Why does Krugman’s employer pay for him to be wrong so often and so obviously wrong?
Understandable, I suppose, since the Inquirer newspaper, in my city of Philadelphia, pays for a whole editorial masthead and commentators, too, who are wrong most of the time, but still employed and still paid!
Why?
The Man.
Paul Krugman is a fool and most economists are like weathermen. Weathermen and economists: the job where you can be wrong 80% of the time and people still hang on every word. Let’s face it, we’ll never be able to preduct the weather, the future, nor the economy.
He is not the only one predicting a recession.
Very poorly thought out article to put it mildly. Yes, Krugman was wrong to predict recession the night that Trump was elected in 2016. On the other hand, the prediction that Biden would preside over an economic boom came true. Many did not see it that way because of inflation but GDP growth and employment growth did very well in those years(the normal critieria to gage how an economy is doing). Sure, tax revenues are up and some economic statistics including the inflation rate look good but Trumps tariffs have not been around long enough to show up in the data just yet. So it is not yet time to spike the football! It is incredible that an editorial board could approve an article this poorly thought out! Shame on the editorial board of this publication!
Good gawd. You think Biden presided over a stellar economy?