Donald Trump, Republican presidential front-runner and billionaire real estate mogul, warns in a new interview with The Hill that the current stock market bubble is on the verge of popping, which could send the country spiraling into another economic recession.
Trump said he believes Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen is intentionally keeping interest rates low in an attempt to prevent a recession during President Obama's remaining time in office. Should another recession occur, it would both tarnish Obama's legacy and diminish the Democratic Party's chances of retaining the White House in the 2016 presidential election.
"She's keeping the economy going, barely," Trump told The Hill. "The reason they're keeping the interest rate down is Obama doesn't want to have a recession-slash-depression during his administration."
Economists say there is a 15 percent chance the U.S. will experience a downturn in the next year, up from a 10 percent chance over the past 13 months, according to a recent Bloomberg News survey.
Peter Schiff, financial analyst and CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, agreed with Trump, recently saying that the Fed is likely holding off on raising interest rates due to fear of triggering a recession that would hand the White House to Republicans in the 2016 election, according to Newsmax.
For nearly seven years now, the Fed has kept the benchmark interest rate close to zero, and stocks have nearly tripled from the low seen in the financial crisis. Low inflation, unsettled financial markets and weakness in the global economy were cited by the Fed as reasons for keeping the rates low, Newsmax reports.
Those kinds of decisions harm everyday Americans the most, according to Trump, and the Fed has placed the country on path towards an economic collapse.
"You know who gets hurt the most? People who practice the American dream and did what should have been the right way - the people that went through 40 years of their life and saved a hundred dollars every week [in the bank]," Trump said.
"They worked all their lives to save and now what happens is they're being forced into an inflated stock market and at some point they'll get wiped out," he added.
Trump also criticized the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, which has been touted by Democrats as working to protecting taxpayers from risky banking investments.
"It's terrible," he said as he vowed to "absolutely" repeal it. "Under Dodd-Frank, the regulators are running the banks. The bankers are petrified of the regulators. And the problem is that the banks aren't loaning money to people who will create jobs."
