In an appearance on CNN, the U.S. National Editor for the Financial Times, Ed Luce, claimed President Donald Trump is being schooled — but he ‘isn't learning a lesson’.
‘The Situation Room’ hosts Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown both pressed the editor on the economy under Trump.
Blitzer asked, “What's the significance of this new IMF outlook about the global economy?”
She was referencing a worrying report from the International Monetary Fund.
“I think the significance is it's highly anticipated that they were going to forecast, and to some extent, I'm surprised they didn't downgrade them even more," said Luce.
"I mean, 1.8% U.S. growth this year is still relatively on the high side. I would have thought if you see a resumption of the trade war. But the significance is that it just sort of feeds into this dawning and quite dramatic realization on the part of markets that U.S. economic policy is going to be capricious, unpredictable and a very hard climate in which to invest whilst Donald Trump remains president. That's really the sort of the salient fact in all of this. They don't trust President Trump."
Brown then asked, “A lot of economists say that the economic turmoil that you just laid out it's manmade. It's not a crisis beyond our control, like the pandemic, in that case, does it make it easier to change course now, or can you not put the genie back in the bottle?”
“Well, so the last 2 or 3 weeks have been a real schooling of President Trump in terms of market pushback against this trade war. And yet on Monday morning, yesterday he came out and said that Jerome Powell, the chair of the Fed, should cut rates now and keeps reiterating threats to fire him, which he's not allowed to do under the law. That then triggered the biggest one-day sell-off in decades.
"He's been schooled, but it doesn't seem like he's learning the lesson, and the markets are learning a lesson that he is extremely volatile."