Billionaire Carl Icahn, the founder of Icahn Enterprises, is predicting that the economy of the US may be heading into “a recession or even worse.” The famous investor warned of “a lot of trouble ahead” and “a rough landing.”
He declared that based on his experience on the boards of several companies, “when you get to understand what these boards do, the system is needing fixing.” He also mentioned that currently “we have supply chain problems” because “our companies are so badly run.”
Icahn further stated:
“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 didn’t stop there, as he said that: “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.”
When asked if he believes there is any chance for a soft landing, he replied: “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. 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.”
He concluded by saying:
“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.”