A recent poll in the United States has shown that Americans are largely pessimistic about US prospects in 2023, with the vast majority of the population expecting this year to be rife with political conflict and economic hardships.
According to US-based pollster Gallup, Americans entered the new year “with a mostly gloomy outlook” for the nation.
Ninety percent of Americans said they expected this year to be a period of political conflict in the US, according to the survey.
On the economy, about eight in 10 US adults said they thought 2023 would be a year of economic hardships with higher taxes and a growing budget deficit while more than half said they expected unemployment to rise.
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Pollsters found Republicans to be more pessimistic than Democrats about the conditions in the US, which Gallup said is a typical phenomenon based on the party of the sitting president.
According to Gallup, Americans overall had little expectation that the economic struggles that closed out 2022 will abate in 2023.
Meanwhile, experts predict that the chances of an economic recession hitting the US are high.
The former president of the New York Federal Reserve, William Dudley, said that recession is “pretty likely.” Dudley warned on Tuesday that the US Fed Reserve’s new measures would lead to a recession.
In order to curb unprecedented inflation, the Fed has raised interest rates, saying it will continue down that path as one of its measures to bring down inflation, with the ultimate goal of pushing it down to 2 percent over the next few years.
