The economy officially emerged from recession in June 2009, but the failings of the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve will put us in harm's way again, says Steve Forbes, chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media.

"It's not as bad as it was in 2008 and '09, but after every sharp downturn in American history up to now, we've always had a sharp recovery and the question became, could we sustain it," he told Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview

While the recovery has been lackluster this time around, "you will get periods where things look kind of calm, and things are starting to look a little better," said Forbes, co-author with Elizabeth Ames of "Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy and What We Can Do About It."

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The problem? "Because they [the Obama administration and Fed] don't know what they're doing, we're going to be in trouble again," he proclaimed. "It's like in days of old, when a patient got sick, they'd bleed the patient. When they stopped bleeding the patient, the patient had a chance to get better."

With the Fed now cutting back on its bond purchases, "we're getting less bleeding of the patient," said the former Republican presidential candidate. "But they still don't know what they're doing. They're guilty of economic malpractice."

The Fed and Treasury's actions to depress the dollar during the past decade have caused inflation and other economic problems, Forbes insisted.

"We got oil going from $21 a barrel to about $100 a barrel. So you've already had the real turmoil in the economy here and around the world," he explained.

"And the very slow recovery that we've had, the slowest in American history, is a result of what the Federal Reserve did with so-called quantitative easing [QE]."

QE, which has pushed the Fed's balance sheet to $4.3 trillion, hasn't sent inflation soaring, as officially measured, Forbes noted. Consumer prices officially rose 2 percent in the year through April.

But inflation is higher than the consumer price index (CPI) would indicate, because the government keeps changing the CPI. "That's why you see more expensive food in the supermarket, more expensive gasoline, but it doesn't seem to show up in the CPI," he argued.

"The bottom line is what the Federal Reserve did was to make it easy for the federal government to borrow, . . . make it very easy for large corporations to borrow, but make it very difficult by putting pressure on banks to tighten up on lending standards."

That made it tough for new and small businesses, which are the biggest job creators, to get loans. "Only recently have banks begun to start lending to small and new businesses, which is why the economy will do a bit better," Forbes explained.

"But it's like a baseball player that's supposed to be a batting champion going from a .180 batting average to about .250 or .260. That's still not going to get us to the World Series."

As for the stock market, which has continually hit new record peaks in recent days, it "set a nominal record, but if you look where it was 12 or 14 years ago, it is still a very mediocre, poor performance."

If the United States went back to the gold standard, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would be at 25,000 or 30,000, rather than Tuesday morning's level of 16,906, he asserted.

In addition, he noted, "a lot of people have been forced into the market" by low interest rates. "So that's where you get the manipulation."

Forbes isn't impressed with central bank easing in Europe and Japan either. "The euro is a little better than the dollar, but that's all relative. The euro is weak, the dollar is weak."

As for Japan, "the yen has been a little bit weak," he said. "They're trying to practice quantitative easing. Why they want to imitate what we're doing, I don't know. It's one reason why Japan's been in a rut for the last 20 years."

So looking broadly, "the sad thing is none of the world gets it on money, really, which is one reason why we wrote this book, to start educating people," Forbes remarked.

"Money simply makes it easier to do transactions with each other. It is a measure of value. . . . If economists understood that, they wouldn't be manipulating it."

As for how free-market principles can be guaranteed, "one of the things we point out in the book is the erosion of social trust when you have unsound money," he stated. "John Maynard Keynes got that right nearly a century ago."

Seattle's recent increase of its minimum wage "is a manifestation of what happens when social trust is undermined," Forbes noted. "When people don't have faith in the future, they turn to expedience, like mandating higher wages, which won't work in the real world."

Prosperity is what does work. "And the key to prosperity is what we did for 180 years in this country: having a sound dollar, sensible taxation," he explained.

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"And then this economy will once again lead the world and people's wages will rise again. When you have funny money, unsound money instead of good money, then you do have income stagnating."

That's what we've seen for the last 10 years. "Therefore you get eruptions like what you see in Seattle, even though all the evidence points out that it's going to end up costing jobs, especially among young people."

As for Pope Francis' call for income redistribution, "his two predecessors understood that true capitalism, true free markets enable people to move up," Forbes asserted.

"One of the things the current pope is overcoming is his background in Argentina where you didn't have free markets. You had state capitalism, what we call crony capitalism."

The best way to achieve the pope's goal of eradicating poverty is prosperity, he argued. "And the best way to get prosperity is to have a sound currency, low taxes, and then by golly, people have a chance to move up in the world and create higher incomes for all."

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