Navarro: 'I guarantee no recession, okay?'
White House senior trade adviser Peter Navarro attempted to assure the American public that the country will not plunge into a recession sparked by President Trump's recent sweeping tariffs, suggesting Wall Street's 500 biggest corporations will lead the economic turnout.
Navarro said the market is “finding a bottom now. It's finding a bottom now, but it ... look, here's the thing ... it's going to shift over and it's going to be companies in the S&P 500 who are the first to produce here. Those are the ones are going to lead the recovery."
“And it's going to happen, Dow 50,000, I guarantee that, and I guarantee no recession, okay? Why? Because when we pass the biggest, broadest tax cut in history within a matter of months, that's going to be a great stimulus,” he said Monday during an appearance on Fox News's "The Ingraham Angle."
“There's not going to be any inflation,” Navarro told host Laura Ingraham. “We've already had a significant drop, a huge drop in oil prices, Laura. That's like a point off the CPI. We're going to have lower yields and mortgage.”
His comments come after Trump signaled openness on Monday to negotiating with other countries looking to soften the blow of the new tariffs. The import taxes, rolled out last week, include a 10 percent base tariff on nearly on foreign trading partners with the addition of higher reciprocal tariffs on a slew of nations.
“We’re going to get fair deals and good deals with everybody. And if we don’t, we’re going to have nothing to do with them,” Trump said Monday from the Oval Office. “They’re not going to be allowed to participate in the United States.”
Global financial markets bounced back slightly early Tuesday after two days of slumps.
But investors in the U.S., analysts and corporate heavyweights are still not sold on the president’s economic agenda, while some CEOs think the country could already be in a recession, according to BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink.
“The president has been focusing on right now areas that, in my mind, in the short run, are very inflationary and destabilizing the economy,” Fink said Monday at the Economic Club of New York.
Navarro, who received blowback over the weekend from Trump’s influential ally and tech billionaire Elon Musk — who has shown opposition to tariffs in recent days — told Ingraham that the U.S. will eventually be able to produce Apple’s iPhones domestically.
“We're going to be able to do it through - through more automation and there's going to be plenty of jobs for robots, plenty of jobs for humans,” Navarro said. “I'm telling you, Laura, this is going to be a golden age."
"And the thing like, you take automobiles, what we're doing now is a scam like BMW comes to Spartanburg, South Carolina, and all we do is assemble German transmissions and autos," he continued. "It's like they get all the good jobs. They get all the good profits, and we get stuck with a hindsight."
Navarro, who also served as a trade adviser during Trump's first term, argued that the current system is "not working."