Jeff Bezos, the founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, surprised analysts after recommending that Americans avoid buying expensive goods this year on Black Friday and during the winter holidays, according to MarketWatch.

“If you’re an individual thinking about buying a big screen TV, maybe you should take your time, save up some money and see what happens. The same with a refrigerator, a new car or other things,” he said in an interview with CNN the other day.

His comments went largely unnoticed because in the same American television interview he made a more high-profile statement: that he would give away most of his $124 billion during his lifetime.

But his comments got a little more attention this Friday, which is Black Friday in the United States. lasts several days or even weeks).

So why did Bezos recommend that consumers and small businesses take their time to buy expensive products? He gave a great and broad reason.

“If we’re not in a recession now, we probably will be in one very soon,” he said in the same interview, echoing a warning he issued on Twitter last month.

Bezos and Elon Musk are worried about the American economy

Bezos, who is now Amazon’s executive chairman after stepping down as CEO last year, is not the only American billionaire or analyst to recently warn that the U.S. economy is not in great shape.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, told Tesla executives in an email in early June that he had a “very bad” feeling about the U.S. economy, urging the electric car maker to freeze all global hiring.

Like Musk, Jeff Bezos criticized the economic policies of the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden in the context of historical inflation in the United States. But unlike the South African billionaire, who urged Americans to vote Republican in last week’s midterm elections, Bezos remains largely apolitical.

Some investors already see an economic crisis in the US

Michael Berry, the legendary Wall Street investor immortalized in the film The Big Shortin September he noted that the crisis he predicted for the American economy had already begun.

On June 6, Berry sounded the alarm about the state of the US economy, warning that it was being buoyed by people turning to savings to stay afloat amid rampant inflation, and that money saved by households was being spent quickly.

“Tracking Total Savings to GDP in the US. The red line is the historic low of 1.5% set in July 2005. At the pace of spending savings over the past 12 months, this level could be reached between September and December this year,” he said on Twitter.

“We are borrowing time,” he emphasized this summer.