President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on Wednesday — and people have been reacting as global markets take a hammering.
Here is what big names in business and economics have been saying:
Business Roundtable
Joshua Bolten, CEO of the association that represents more than 200 CEOs, said in a statement the tariffs “run the risk of causing major harm to American manufacturers, workers, families and exporters. Damage to the US economy will increase the longer the tariffs are in place and may be exacerbated by retaliatory measures.”
He said the Business Roundtable “supports President Trump’s goal of securing better and fairer trade deals with our trading partners” but called on him to introduce “additional reasonable exemptions” and a “transparent, predictable exclusion process.”
Larry Summers
“Never before has an hour of Presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much,” the former Treasury Secretary wrote on X. “The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now closer to $30 trillion.”
Summers also said the tariffs were the most “expensive” and “masochistic” the US had imposed in decades.
Mohamed El-Erian
“The price action in global financial markets in the immediate aftermath of the US tariff announcement points to major worries about global economic growth,” the former Pimco CEO and chief economic advisor at Allianz said on X.
Mariana Mazzucato
“These tariffs will cause inflation in the United States; they will cause lower consumer power of US workers. The estimates are between $1,700 to $5,000 per family in terms of the costs of these tariffs,” the economics professor at University College London told ITV’s “Peston” program.
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Boaz Weinstein
The Saba Capital Management founder doesn’t expect Trump to change course, posting on X, “I’m often wrong, but I don’t see him doing a u-turn. This is not a buy-the-dip opportunity. It’s a sell the dip opportunity.”
David Rosenberg
“So, this tariff file is now being labeled “Make America Wealthy Again”? What is with that adverb “again” which is defined as “returning to a previous condition”? The previous condition, I can tell you, was not nearly as good as the current condition, seeing as US net national net worth just reached a record level of $157 TRILLION (a cool $1.2 million per household … too bad we don’t all live at the average!),” the founder and president of Rosenberg Research & Associates said on X.
“Have tariffs really stood in the way of wealth creation in America? I think the title should simply be the truth: “Let’s Make the World Poor Again” (and then we can buy it at a discount),” Rosenberg added.
Nouriel Roubini
The professor emeritus of the NYU Stern School of Business said the “Liberation Day” label was “Orwellian doublespeak.”
“Whatever the consequences of these tariffs will be — ie lower growth and higher inflation and how much of it depending on the eventual size of these tariffs post-negotiations that will be ugly and long-drawn. There is absolutely no “liberation” at all in them: not for US consumers, workers and businesses, let alone for the rest of the world,” he said on X.
Paul Krugman
“I guess it’s just possible that when we get details about the Trump tariffs they will be lower than what he just announced, but based on what he said, he’s gone full-on crazy,” said Paul Krugman, Nobel-winning economist and former MIT and Princeton University professor wrote on Substack.
“If you had any hopes that Trump would step back from the brink, this announcement, between the very high tariff rates and the complete falsehoods about what other countries do, should kill them,” Krugman added.
