Even though there may be risks in markets and politically from President Trump’s rebalancing of global trade, the work on behalf of Americans is long overdue and the rewards outweigh the risks, according to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
“Let's just get it fair. It'll be better for America, I get it, but we're not just America first and America exclusively,” Lutnick told Newsmax. “We are America first, but we love our allies and it's going to work out great for them as well.”
While President Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are working on the “big dog” challenge of China, Lutnick is in charge of trade deals with “the rest of the world.”
“Everybody wants to make a deal. Of course they do, because we are the consumer of the Earth. So the concept of: ‘Oh, I'm not going to do business with America!’ I'm going to do business with who?! We're the customer, right? If you ignore the customer, you do it at your own peril. We all know that. We're the greatest buyer of everybody's products, so they all need to sell to us. They all want to sell to us. We want to buy from them, but let's do it fairly. We need to be able to sell our products; you can't block us out and take advantage of us,” Lutnick said.
Balancing the trade deficit will be helpful in relaxing concerns in the global market, Wall Street, and among Americans in general, Lutnick said, estimating as well that the U.S. gives 4 percent of GDP to other nations, based on a $30 trillion annual gross domestic product.
Lutnick believes that Trump can affect U.S. GDP by 2 to 3 percentage points per year.
“You take that awesome economy, the greatest economy in the world, and you put the right guy in the Oval Office, Donald Trump, you could have 2-3 points of GDP growth. We've let everybody else take advantage of us,” Lutnick said.
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