(MarketWatch) "Before I came to the White House I spent a better part of 20 years forecasting the business cycle and stock market trends, and what I can tell you with certainty is that we’re going to have a strong economy through 2020 and beyond with a bull market."
That’s White House trade adviser Peter Navarro expressing some serious optimism in an interview with ABC News on Sunday.
Why so bullish? It’s all about the stimulus.
“The Fed will be lowering rates. The ECB will be engaging in monetary stimulus. China will be engaging in fiscal stimulus,” he forecast.
Navarro also said “the largest trade deal ever in history” will provide a boost.
“By early October, if Congress rises above partisan politics, we should have passage of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement,” Navarro predicted, adding that it will “give us hundreds of thousands of more jobs, more growth points... ”
He then went on to slam the Wall Street Journal after ABC host Martha Raddatz brought up the paper’s using the “Navarro Recession” label.
“Why hasn’t the Wall Street Journal been editorializing over the last 10 years about China’s hacking our computers to steal trade secrets, about stealing our intellectual property, about forcing the technology transfer from our companies, about the currency manipulation that occurred for over a decade?” he said. “The Wall Street Journal never saw an American job it didn’t want to offshore.”
Raddatz then asked about the tariffs and why the president announced he’d delay them to help U.S. consumers even though he said previously that China was bearing the brunt of the impact.
“We have $300 billion worth of Chinese exports that did not yet have tariffs. So what the president did was looked at that, and, as of September 1st, about half of that will be tariffed at 10%” he said. “Now, the other half, why didn’t we tariff the other half? One of the things the president does beautifully is engage with the business community, labor leaders and everybody in between.”
He said Trump met with a group of executives who told him that all the products on their shelves had already been bought in dollar contracts. “What does that mean for your viewers? It means that these people did not have any power to basically shift the burden back to China,” Navarro said.
