IBM Vice Chairman Says Consumers Are ‘Under Enormous Pressure,’ Warns Of Economic ‘Softness’

International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation Vice Chairman Gary Cohn warned Sunday on CBS that consumers already facing “enormous pressure” financially may be disadvantaged by looming “softness” in the economy.

Within the last year U.S. voters have vocalized their concerns over the economy and inflation, making the two issues a top priority when it comes to voting this November. While President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have defended their administration’s economic record, Cohn stated that following the COVID-19 lockdowns consumers expected the economy to “stay strong.”

“Consumers are under enormous pressure. So remember, we all came out of COVID with consumers in the best balance sheets we had seen in our lifetimes. We put enormous amount of stimulus into consumer’s balance sheets,” Cohn said. “When the economy reopened, consumers did what we really know how to do well in the United States, is not only spend what they have in their account, they use all of the capacity on their credit cards.”

“People went out and spent, they took vacations — we saw that. They spent a lot of money on their houses and they went out and got their credit cards fully charged up. They assumed that the economy was going to stay strong, they assumed that job growth was going to stay steady, they assumed that they would continue to be able to maintain that lifestyle,” Cohn said.