One of America’s most influential economists finally had the moxie to admit what any American with half a brain could see about the Trump tariffs: The elitist, stuck-up doom prophets were all wrong.
Wharton School Professor of Practice Mohamed El-Erian joined the October 27 edition of Fox News’s America Reports to discuss President Donald Trump’s ongoing tariff negotiations with communist China. “What the U.S. has managed to achieve on tariffs was something most economists didn’t think was going to happen,” El-Erian told co-anchor Sandra Smith.
“We thought there would be massive retaliation against the U.S. — there hasn’t been. Europe, the U.K., a number of Asian countries have all signed framework agreements. The only outstanding ones are India, Canada and China and there’s clear progress on China,” El-Erian continued.
El-Erian then turned to revenues, also on Trump’s increasing list of “W’s” against the media geniuses obsessed with their own voices like CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman, who kvetched ad nauseum how he was going to steer the U.S. economy into a proverbial iceberg:
Secondly, we’re collecting a lot of tariff revenues. On an annual basis, we’re now looking at $300 billion of tariff revenues. Third, the impact on inflation has been limited. So if you look at what people have been worried about: The U.S. has gotten to a fairer trading system without the disadvantages that people thought would materialize. Now it’s early days, so one has to consolidate these gains. But it’s a different outcome from where many economists, including me, thought we would be.
Smith was stunned by El-Erian’s “remarkable statement,” and confirmed his argument that the Trump tariffs’ effects on inflation have been minimal at best.
El-Erian is not the only economist to concede that the so-called experts that attach their faces to TV network cameras like barnacles were wildly off the mark on Trump’s economic reshuffling of the global trading system. On October 1, Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Sløk wrote to clients that “The consensus has been wrong since January.”
While the average economic forecasts have said the U.S. economy would slow down “for nine months running,” wrote Lichtenberg, Sløk conceded that “‘the reality is that it has simply not happened … We in the economics profession need to look ourselves in the mirror.’”
Bidenomics simp Paul Krugman must be having a conniption right now that the narrative once again isn’t going his way.
