Billionaire Carl Icahn, the founder of Icahn Enterprises, has predicted that the U.S. economy could be heading into “a recession or even worse.” The famous investor warned of “a lot of trouble ahead” and “a rough landing.”
Billionaire Carl Icahn Predicts a Recession in the US
Famous investor and billionaire Carl Icahn said Tuesday in an interview with CNBC that a recession or something worse could be on the horizon for the U.S. economy. Icahn is the founder of Icahn Enterprises, a public company and diversified conglomerate holding company based in New York City. His current net worth is approximately $17 billion.
Noting that surging inflation is a major threat to the economy, he said:
I think there very well could be a recession or even worse.
He explained that based on his experience sitting on the boards of a lot of companies, “when you get to understand what these boards do, the system is needing fixing.” He also noted that at this point, “we have supply chain problems” because “our companies are so badly run.”
Icahn opined:
There’s no accountability in corporate America. You have some very fine companies with some very fine CEOs, but far too many that are not up to the task that I think is going to be necessitated.
He proceeded to share his investing strategy. “I have kept everything hedged for the last few years and I think now that we do have it, we have a strong hedge against the long positions that we try to be activists in and get that edge. So that’s the way I look at it, but I am negative as you can hear. Short term, I don’t even predict,” he detailed.
The Icahn Enterprises founder was then asked if he believes there will be a soft landing. “I really don’t know if they [the Fed] can engineer a soft landing or not, but … I think we do have a lot of trouble ahead … I think there’s going to be a rough landing,” he replied, elaborating:
Inflation is a terrible thing when it gets going. You can’t get that genie back in the bottle too easily. We saw it in the 70s, we saw what happened.
“In the last 20 or 30 years … You had cheap goods coming in from the Far East, from China, for sure, and even from Russia … I think those days are over now, and you have this [Russia-Ukraine] war going on now which adds another problem to your inflationary picture,” the billionaire noted.
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