‘Massively Negative’: Trump Economic Adviser Predicts U.S. GDP Will Plunge 40% in Second Quarter

Kevin Hassett, senior economic adviser to President Donald Trump, predicted on Fox Business Wednesday that the United States GDP will shrink by a massive 40% in the second quarter due to the coronavirus pandemic.

After being asked by Fox host Maria Bartiromo whether it’s “fair to say that it’s the second quarter that’s going to see worst of this,” Hassett responded, “I think that we do have a lot of visibility on that because what’s happened is that for the second quarter we’ve really shut things down, and now gradually the governors, as they decide it is safe, are going to start opening up.”

“And as they do that there’s necessarily going to be more output and more GDP, so I think that Q2 is going to be a massively negative number. My guess right now is probably around -40 percent,” Hassett predicted. “Then Q3 will be a very, very large positive number because we are going from stopped to not stopped.”

Hassett also had a bleak assessment of the U.S. job market, as unemployment claims skyrocket.

“The jobs numbers are very, very chilling, and I think that it’s very important to let people understand in a very somber way that this is the biggest shock that our economy has ever seen,” he said. “But it’s something that we’ve done in order to get ahead of the curve on the disease so it’s something that we can reverse hopefully relatively quickly.”

Just last week, Hassett predicted on CNBC that the second quarter could drop to -30 percent — ten percent higher than his current prediction — and said the Q2 GDP is “going to be the biggest negative number that we’ve seen since the Great Depression.”

Watch above via Fox Business.