Mr Biden ended 2022 in a festive mood, vacationing with his wife, Jill, daughter Ashley, and grandchildren Hunter and Natalie in the Virgin Islands. Aides described him as being in good spirits all week, a mood echoed by Mr. Biden in the few brief public appearances he made in St. Croix.
“Good year next year,” he told reporters after coming out of church on New Year’s Day. “Look forward.”
He raised his thumb.
Mr Biden has highlighted the positives of the economic recovery since taking office less than a year after taking office following the rapidly descending pandemic recession. He has highlighted strong job growth, especially in manufacturing, and called the United States better positioned than its peers to weather difficulties for the global economy in the coming years.
Economic events have hampered that message, especially rapidly rising consumer prices. Inflation reached its highest point in 40 years under Mr Biden last year. It’s starting to improve, but remains well above historical standards. Forecasters expect economic growth to slow significantly this year as the Federal Reserve, along with other central banks around the world, continues to aggressively raise interest rates in an effort to dampen price growth.
Those tariff hikes, along with the lingering effects of the war in Ukraine, threaten a spreading recession that could consume the United States. Several major economies, including England and parts of continental Europe, have already entered recession. In the event of a contraction in America, Mr. Biden will most likely find Congress unwilling to spend money to try and revive growth.
“For most of the global economy, this is going to be a tough year, tougher than the one we’re leaving behind,” Kristalina Georgieva, the chief executive of the International Monetary Fund, told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. But, she added: “The US is the most resilient. The US can avoid a recession.”
Mr Biden’s economics team argues that resilience is a direct result of the series of laws he pushed through Congress in his first two years, which delivered large parts of the economic agenda he put forward in the 2020 campaign and at the beginning of his term of office.
