What Happens When the Economy Collapses on Trump's Watch?
President Trump doesn’t have many tentpole accomplishments to tout as his presidency enters its third year. He does have the economy, though, which has boomed since he assumed office back in January 2017. He might not have it much longer. On Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook warned that the company wasn’t going to earn as much as expected in the coming financial quarter. “While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China,” he wrote in a letter to investors. “We believe the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States. As the climate of mounting uncertainty weighed on financial markets, the effects appeared to reach consumers as well, with traffic to our retail stores and our channel partners in China declining as the quarter progressed.”
On Thursday morning, the markets responded as expected. The DOW plummeted over 600 points, the S&P 500 fell 2.2 percent and the Nasdaq dipped 2.6 percent as concern swelled over the impact the president’s trade war will have on the global economy. Since Trump began imposing tariffs last year, economists, politicians and several corporations have warned of their impact, and it’s unclear how much longer the economy will be able to stand the strain of Trump’s trade policy. Over the past year, the president has excoriated suffering companies like Harley-Davidson and, most recently, GM for not having more patience.
As the markets sank on Thursday morning, Trump’s own economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, predicted that the tech giant that in 2018 was valued at $1 trillion won’t be the only American company to experience a downturn. “It’s not going to be just Apple,” he said Thursday on CNN. “There are a heck of a lot of U.S. companies that have sales in China that are going to be watching their earnings being downgraded next year until we get a deal with China.”
Link to tweet
As David Frum of The Atlantic pointed out on Twitter, Hassett in June assured Americans that Trump’s tariffs were very much a good thing and that everybody should just remain calm. “There’s a massive amount of activity coming home,” Hassett said at a Washington Post event shortly after Harley-Davidson announced it was moving some of its production overseas as a result of the tariffs. “Harley-Davidson is an interesting story,” he continued, “but if you look at the data, the opposite is happening.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/us-economy-recession-774588/
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