Trump blasts Paul Krugman for predicting his election would spark a global recession

• President Trump blasted Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Sunday for predicting his election would devastate the global economy.
• "If you listened to the flawed advice of @paulkrugman at the @nytimes, a newspaper that was going broke until I came along, you would have entirely missed the RECORD BREAKING Stock Market (and other) numbers produced since Election Day, 2016," Trump tweeted.
• "We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight," Krugman wrote after the 2016 election.
• Krugman has repeatedly attacked Trump's economic record, but his doomsday predictions are yet to come true.
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President Donald Trump blasted Paul Krugman on Sunday, pointing to the record US stock market as evidence that the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist missed the mark when he predicted Trump's election would devastate the global economy.

"If you listened to the flawed advice of @paulkrugman at the @nytimes, a newspaper that was going broke until I came along, you would have entirely missed the RECORD BREAKING Stock Market (and other) numbers produced since Election Day, 2016," Trump tweeted. "Sorry, those are the FACTS....."

Trump and Krugman have traded attacks since the economist warned of huge economic fallout after the 2016 election.

"If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never," Krugman wrote in the New York Times, arguing the global economy was vulnerable and the new administration would likely constrain the Federal Reserve. "We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight."

Krugman is a longtime Trump critic

Krugman has repeatedly sounded the alarm on Trump. Last August, he argued the inverted yield curve - a proven recession indicator - was a "vote of no confidence in Donald Trump's economic policies."

"The tweeter in chief bungled his way into a Trump slump," Krugman wrote in a column last October, adding that Trump only continued an economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama. A week later, he called the president "immature and incompetent," an "enemy of the people," and "lazy, utterly incurious and too insecure to listen to advice or ever admit a mistake."

In another October column, Krugman dismissed Trump's 2017 tax cut as a "big fizzle." He argued Trump's "economic narrative is falling apart" given weakness across American manufacturing, shipping, and agriculture, slowing economic growth, and faltering business confidence. "A fifth of the economy is effectively in recession," he added.

In December, after Trump reached a preliminary deal to de-escalate the prolonged US-China trade war, Krugman tweeted that "Trump has made us weak." He followed up that attack in a column this month, dismissing the president as a "bully with delusions of grandeur."

Trump has fired back at Krugman

True to his reputation, Trump has counter punched several times. For example, he fired off a pair of tweets in November:

"Paul Krugman of @nytimes has been wrong about me from the very beginning. Anyone who has followed his "words of wisdom" has lost a great deal of money. Paul, just concede the game, say I was right, and lets start a brand new game!"

"Paul Krugman has called me wrong from day one. People at the Failing New York Times are very angry at him for having "missed" by soooo much. Paul, match over!"

Trump struck a similar chord in a tweet last April:

"Paul Krugman, of the Fake News New York Times, has lost all credibility, as has the Times itself, with his false and highly inaccurate writings on me. He is obsessed with hatred, just as others are obsessed with how stupid he is. He said Market would crash, Only Record Highs!"

Trump is winning the spat so far

Krugman has largely dismissed Trump's economic record, pointing to warning signs and patches of weakness in the US economy, and underlining the severe impact of the trade war on business confidence and consumers' wallets.

However, continued US economic growth, stocks at record highs, and unemployment at a 50-year low mean Krugman's doomsday predictions are yet to come true.