Nancy Lazar — the chief global economist of investment bank Piper Sandler — said on Monday that the world is in the first part of a “very significant” recession. During an interview with Fox Business, Lazar told anchor Maria Bartiromo that “It’s going to be a global recession pulling down [the] Eurozone in particular” and noted that “it looks like China GDP in the second quarter could also be negative.”
Lazar added that economic activity in the United States “will feel very, very weak” as growth slows down from last year’s recovery. “Now we think the United States could not go into a recession. We have still plus 1% GDP for the U.S. this year, but that’s still a very significant slowdown from roughly 6% last year,” Lazar explained.
She added that similar fears of a recession occurred in 2015 and 2016. U.S. economic growth was revised slightly higher in the final months of 2021, helping the nation record its best year for growth in nearly four decades before the highly contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus dampened consumer spending and further strained the global supply chain.
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew by 7% on an annualized basis in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said in its second reading of the data in February. The economy grew at an annual revised rate of 2.3% in the third quarter. Lazar noted that the U.S. faced “a similar situation back in 2015” and that there were “fears of a recession” in 2016.
