Investment guru Jim Cramer saus company leaders across industries have privately confessed to him that they're worried about a slowdown in the U.S. economy.
"So many CEOs have told me about how quickly things have cooled," the "Mad Money" host said on CNBC. "So many of them are baffled that we could find ourselves in this late-cycle dilemma that wasn't supposed to occur so soon," Cramer said.
Cramer has been warning that the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes and the Trump administration's tariffs could grind economic growth to a halt, CNBC.com explained.
"There are degrees of slowdowns that, nonetheless, can cause an awful lot of havoc and cost a lot of jobs, and that's what we're on the verge of here," he said. "That's what the markets are saying. That's what the CEOs are worried about offline," Cramer said.
If the Fed and Trump stay the course on their policies, the weakness will feed into the stock market as it did on Thursday, the "Mad Money" host warned.
"If the Fed changes course and says 'No more rate hikes ... next year unless the data gets more positive,' or if President Trump gets a trade deal with China or even does this kind of truce, then the end-of-cycle proponents may have to change their tune and the market can rocket higher," he said.
"Otherwise, though, rallies like today are going to be used to re-position portfolios because the bears have the late-cycle microphone and they just will not let go."
Meanwhile, even some official measurements of future economic growth have been trimmed a bit.
The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow forecast model showed on Thursday that the U.S. economy is expanding at a 2.8 percent annualized rate in the fourth quarter, based on domestic retail sales data in October, This is slower than the 2.9 percent pace for fourth-quarter gross domestic product that the Atlanta Fed’s GDP program calculated on Nov. 9, Reuters reported.
The Commerce Department said earlier Thursday U.S. retail sales increased by 0.8 percent last month, compared with a downwardly revised 0.1 percent decrease in September. Sales in August were also weaker than previously thought.
For his part, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has laid out a scenario for a pause in the central bank’s interest-rate hiking campaign sometime next year by highlighting potential headwinds to the U.S. economy, Bloomberg explained.
While generally upbeat about the outlook, Powell on Wednesday listed three possible challenges to growth in 2019: slowing demand abroad, fading fiscal stimulus at home and the lagged economic impact of the Fed’s past rate increases.
“These are things we are well aware of,’’ he said in an appearance at the Dallas Fed.
The central bank is widely expected to raise rates for the fourth time this year in December -- and Powell did nothing to disabuse investors of that notion, playing down the significance of the recent stock market sell-off while playing up the performance of the economy.
But his comments about possible drags on growth in 2019 raise questions about how many times the Fed will boost rates next year. The median forecast of policy makers in September was for three increases of a quarter percentage point each in 2019.