Former Republican congressman and two-time GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul warns that the current stock market is really just a huge bubble that is quickly coming to an end.

The market is in the “biggest bubble in the history of mankind,” and when it bursts, it could cut the stock market in half, he recently told CNBC.

“I see trouble ahead, and it originates with too much debt, too much spending,” the former Republican Congressman from Texas said.

The Newsmax Insider belongs to the Libertarian Party, a faction that emphasizes constrained government spending. He sees federal spending and monetary policy as dual forces inflating a market bubble.

“The Congress spending and the Federal Reserve manipulation of monetary policy and interest rates — debt is too big, the current account is in bad shape, foreign debt is bad and it’s not going to change,” he said.

“The Fed will keep inflating, and that distorts things,” Paul continued. “Now they’re trying to unwind their balance sheet. I don’t think they’re going to get real far on that,”

“The government will keep spending, and the Fed will keep inflating, and that distorts things,” said Paul. “When you get into a situation like this, the debt has to be eliminated. You have to liquidate the debt and the malinvestment.”

Meanwhile, not much of the recent economic data show any signs that the market is about to crumble.

The U.S. economy is growing at a 4.5 percent annualized rate in the second quarter following the latest data on strong retail-sales data, the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow forecast model showed on Monday.

The latest estimate on gross domestic product growth was faster than the 3.9 percent pace estimated on Wednesday, the Atlanta Fed said.

The government said Monday that U.S. retail sales rose at a solid pace last month despite higher prices and modest wage gains, a sign of underlying consumer optimism, the Associated Press reported.

The Commerce Department said Monday that sales at retailers and restaurants increased 0.5 percent in June, following a big 1.3 percent gain the previous month. May’s figure was revised sharply higher from an initial estimate of 0.8 percent.

Americans are confident about the economic outlook, with the unemployment rate near an 18 year-low and the economy accelerating after a sluggish start to the year. Retail sales rose 6.6 percent from a year earlier, the fastest annual pace in five years.

Most U.S. business economists expect corporate sales to grow over the next three months and hiring and pay to rise with them.

But a majority of the economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics say the corporate tax cuts that the Trump administration pushed through Congress have yet to affect their plans for hiring or investment.

Ron Paul is a physician, author, and former Republican congressman. Paul also is a two-time Republican presidential candidate, and the presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party in the 1988 U.S. presidential election. His latest book is “Swords into Plowshares." For more of Ron Paul's reports, Go Here Now.

(Newsmax wires services contributed to this report).