'Disastrous': Ex-Treasury secretary unloads on Trump White House on CNN
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers delivered a scathing rebuke of President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs, an action he estimated amounted to a $30 trillion cumulative hit to the economy.
“That's more damage than any economic policy pursued by any president in the last, probably in American history,” Summers said Thursday in a CNN interview.
And, Summers warned, there is “no reason to think that this is particularly going to get better."
“If markets thought it was going to get better, people wouldn't be selling stocks because they would know it was going to get better and it would be exactly the wrong time to sell,” he said. “So, markets have made a judgment and the judgment is that this was a disastrous error.”
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Summers, who served in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, continued to sound the alarm on the dire economic situation created by Trump that he said he’s “never seen anything remotely like.”
“I used to be worried about this administration not caring enough about the poor,” Summers, an economist, told viewers. “I used to be worried about excesses of power on the part of this administration. I still am. But right now, my primary concern is a lack of basic competence.”
He equated the unfolding tariff war as “the economics equivalent of having attack plans be discussed on open phone lines, including journalists. There is no coherent logic to these policies.”
The former Treasury secretary concluded that "today's day in the market" was the "worst in five years." He used his opportunity on CNN to deliver a parting shot to Trump’s economic advisers.
“I don’t really understand how any self-respecting analyst – a person who holds themselves out as an economic expert – can be comfortable remaining in this administration,” Summers said.