Inflation will force American consumers to curtail their spending to such a degree that the U.S. economy is almost certainly bound for a recession in the third quarter. The Federal Reserve is "nowhere close" to controlling inflation.

So warns former Fed Governor Lawrence Lindsey, who also served as director of the National Economic Council under the George W. Bush administration.

"I do think we're going to have a recession, probably in the next quarter," Lindsey said during an interview on CNBC.

One telltale sign of inevitable inflation that Lindsey says he is looking for would be an increase in the monthly consumer price index (CPI) higher than 1 percentage point. The former Fed official said that monthly CPI prints above 1 percentage point have not occurred since the summer of 1980, Marketwatch reports.

"That's going to push consumer purchasing power down by about 2 [percentage] points on top of the 2.5 points it has already declined since the beginning of 2021," Lindsey told CNBC. "You can't have that much of a shock without having a recession.

"There has never been significant disinflation since the early 1950s without the CPI being lower than the fed funds rate," Lindsey continued, referring to the Fed's benchmark interest rate, now in the 0.25%-0.50% range. "We are nowhere close, nowhere close, to being able to control inflation with what we have."

Earnings adjusted for inflation declined by 2.6% over the 12 months through February, according to the Department of Labor.

Inflation is currently running at 7.9% in the United States, the sharpest spike since 1982, 40 years ago.