On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” White House Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro stated that under the newest tariffs put in by the Trump administration, “the foreign nations who have to sell here are going to lower their prices, and then the next thing they’re going to do is continue to manipulate their currency.”
Navarro said that to calculate the level of tariffs to impose, “You’ve got to value currency manipulation, you’ve got to value the VAT tax distortions, dumping, export subsidies, technical barriers to trade, agricultural barriers to trade, quotas, bans, counterfeiting, intellectual property theft, and all of that.”
Later, he said that the tariffs in the first Trump administration didn’t cause inflation and added, “[I]f you go through — again, as an economist, if you go through the adjustment process, the foreign nations who have to sell here are going to lower their prices, and then the next thing they’re going to do is continue to manipulate their currency. So, our currency is going to get stronger. We’re going to have more purchasing power for the imports. That’s going to offset it. As that’s happening, the supply chains adjust and would come here.”
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