The News
International finance ministers and CEOs in Washington for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings this week are reportedly waxing lyrical about the US economy, a senior White House official told Semafor contributor and former Wall Street Journal editor Jon Hilsenrath in an interview Thursday.
“All they’re talking about is the strength of the US economy,” Lael Brainard, director of the White House Economic Council said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit. “The US is a real source of strength in the global economy.”
Brainard made the case for the Biden administration’s economic record, stressing that growth rates have consistently been around 3% annually — “much stronger than the previous administration in the years prior to the pandemic.”
“The underlying foundations of the economy are very strong,” Brainard said, stressing that inflation rates have recently fallen back down to pre-pandemic levels. “Nobody thought that could happen.”
Inflation fell to 2.4% in September, the lowest annual increase since February 2021, with some analysts increasingly confident the US economy is on track for the Federal Reserve’s targeted “soft landing,” avoiding a recession.
Know More
Despite the health of the country’s economy, Brainard warned that Republican tariff proposals could “take us back to the kind of supply chain disruptions, price spikes, consumer pain that we saw during the pandemic.”
Donald Trump has floated a range of tariff plans, from a 60% tariff on goods from China and a tariff of as much as 20% on all other US imports. Vice President Kamala Harris has called the tariffs a “sales tax on the American people,” while Trump has said they will “make America rich again.”
“What is being proposed today is far more sweeping, far larger, far more disruptive than anything we’ve seen since the 1930s,” Brainard said, warning that because Congress has delegated substantial executive authority to the president on tariffs, a new president could immediately start issuing new duties that would “have quick effect on the US economy and with devastating impacts for US consumers.”