Austan Goolsbee to Newsmax: Raising Interest Rates Could Spark Recession

Former White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee told Newsmax that raising interest rates in response to inflation "could drive us into recession."

Goolsbee told Greta Van Susteren's "The Record" last week: "Well, surprise inflation like what we've had, where the inflation rate is higher than the interest rate, anybody who had debt actually ended up being a winner."

He added: "If you've got a mortgage a year ago, and the inflation rate was faster than the interest rate you were paying on your mortgage, they were in real terms paying you to borrow the money."

Goolsbee said: "Those have been the winners. It's just now the 'paying the piper' time. If the [Federal Reserve] starts raising the interest rates that rapidly, they could drive us into recession for sure, that's the most common cause of recessions since we've been keeping the data is the Fed raising interest rates faster than the economy can handle.

"Now the borrowers will potentially start to suffer, because now the interest rates [are] going to go up, and so that means people buying houses, people buying cars, people buying durable goods, people with big credit card balances, they're the most affected by interest rates."

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