The U.S. will probably enter a recession in the next three years, Carlyle Group LP’s David Rubenstein said.
"At some point in the next year or two or three, you can expect a recession," Rubenstein, Washington-based Carlyle’s co- founder and co-chief executive officer, said Friday in a television interview on “Bloomberg ” with David Westin and Stephanie Ruhle. "It’s not here now. It’s going to be modest growth for a while."
Rubenstein said the U.S. economy is likely to grow 1 percent to 2 percent this year. It expanded in the second quarter more than economists had previously estimated amid bigger gains in consumer and business spending. Gross domestic product rose at a 3.7 percent annualized rate, government figures showed in August, exceeding all estimates of economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, the probability that the world's biggest economy will enter a recession in the next 12 months jumped to 15 percent, its highest level since October 2013, according to economists surveyed Oct. 2-7 by Bloomberg. The median had held at 10 percent for 13 consecutive months.
However, there have been a variety of recent new factors: a delayed Federal Reserve rate hike, turmoil in global equity markets ... and now increased expectations for a downturn in the U.S.
Concerns over China, and the potential spillover to other economies, have led economists to cut their third-quarter growth forecasts to 2 percent from as high as 3 percent in July.
China also is worrying Fed officials, who cited it as a risk to their outlook for economic growth and inflation — so much so that they delayed what would have been the first increase in the benchmark interest rate since 2006.
"Although U.S. economic data releases generally met market expectations, domestic financial conditions tightened modestly as concerns about prospects for global economic growth, centered on China, prompted an increase in financial market volatility and a deterioration in risk sentiment during the intermeeting period," Fed officials said in the minutes of their Sept. 16-17 gathering, released Thursday.
There is a bright spot, though: In a separate survey, economists projected the U.S. won't enter a recession until 2019, after pegging it to 2018 in last month's survey.