"But people need to understand is that it is better to do that than to allow inflation to accelerate and allow everybody to expect inflation, at which point you'll have a much greater set of difficulties ." The US economy has been flashing warning signs of an upcoming recession for months. In the past week alone, a number of economic leaders — including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — have said they worry that recession is imminent. There is currently a 98.1% chance of a global recession next year, according to a probability model run by Ned Davis Research. Major US stock markets, meanwhile, have plummeted. Just last month, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said during a news conference that there is still a path to getting inflation under control without sparking a downturn. But Powell conceded that path has become narrower and Americans are feeling more pain as the Fed has been forced to resort to drastic interest rate hikes to knock down inflation.