The U.S. president, Donald Trump, was interviewed this Sunday on the conservative network Fox News, where he predicted a 'transition period' marked by the tariffs that the U.S. will impose again. Meanwhile, the Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, in an interview on NBC, assured that 'there will be no recession in the U.S.' and argued that 'global tariffs will go down because President Trump has said: do they want to impose 100%? We will impose 100%'.
Trump had to address the fluctuations in his government's tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which worry the markets, and announced that on April 2, the 'reciprocal tariffs' will come into effect, insisting that they make sense because other countries are 'scamming' his. Regarding the reciprocal tariffs on goods from those countries that tax U.S. imports, Lutnick explained that 'some products made abroad may be more expensive, but Americans will become cheaper, and that is the goal'.
Since his return to the White House, Trump has threatened with tariffs on Mexico and Canada, as well as on China, among other countries, and has applied the rates to, in some cases, temporarily reverse them, as in the case of the goods included in the T-MEC agreement with his neighbors. Regarding the pause in tariffs on the fully integrated automotive sector among the three countries, he stated that he did it because he wanted to 'help American manufacturers' and gave them 'a little breather', but maintained that the tariffs 'can go up' later.
Additionally, Trump rejected evaluating those policies based on the impact on the stock market and proposed the Chinese economic monitoring model: 'If you look at China, they have a 100-year perspective'. Interviewed by host Maria Bartiromo, and asked about some data pointing to a recession this year, Trump responded: 'I hate predicting things like that. There is a transition period because what we are doing is very big, we are bringing wealth to the U.S. and insisting on tariffs'.
