Hours before President Donald Trump’s highly anticipated speech at the World Economic Forum, Ken Griffin, the outspoken billionaire CEO of Citadel, gave his rundown of the US leader’s key economic policies.
Trump’s tariffs have been “a negative” and have left the US economy in a “pretty unfortunate position,” said Griffin at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.
The president’s policy to raise tariffs on imports to the US has “disrupted long-standing trading relationships” and led to “higher inflation,” said Griffin.
“We’ve obviously increased the amount of cronyism in America as corporate CEOs have lined up in Washington trying to argue why their business should be exempted from tariffs, and many have prevailed,” he added.
Central to Trump’s tariff agenda is the promise that manufacturing will return to America, reducing US dependency on foreign nations for critical items.
“We have yet to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States,” said Griffin.
The Citadel CEO highlighted that Trump is clearly following through on the platform he was elected on and said that tariffs have had some of their intended effects, though he did not specify what these were.
But one of the main problems with US tariffs is that business leaders are uncertain about how long the policy will stay in place.
“I think people have a very hard time believing that the current tariff regime’s going to persist,” said Griffin. “Before you spend hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars to build a manufacturing plan, you really want to believe that the policy that is the anchor of that decision will be permanent in nature.”
Griffin also gave his two cents on Trump’s immigration and geopolitical policies.
No country’s borders should be open to mass immigration, but closing down the Southern border has meant losing a large supply of labor, said Griffin.
“These are people who did a lot of very, very difficult work, very modest wages, which helped to reduce the level of inflation in the United States,” he said, adding that he expected housing and food prices to rise in the coming years as a result.
The bigger problem that Trump’s immigration policy has caused for the US is that “we’re potentially losing access to the best and brightest minds from around the world,” said Griffin.
“The majority of Silicon Valley is either run by immigrants or children of immigrants,” he said, and their companies have created “a tremendous number of jobs in the United States.”
Speaking ahead of Trump’s speech at Davos on Wednesday, Griffin said he was uncertain about what the US president was hoping to achieve by clashing with Europe over ownership of Greenland: “What I can’t understand is why are we fighting over a piece of rock covered by ice?”
“We have frayed our relationship with our European allies in ways that I don’t understand or appreciate, but there is a push here to get Europe to step up,” said Griffin.
During his speech, Trump ruled out using force to acquire Greenland, but said that he wants “right, title, and ownership” of the nation.
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