US Commerce Secretary Says 3% Growth Not Achievable This Year

May 10, 2017 Share Print 0

The U.S. economy will fall short of the Trump administration’s goal of 3 percent growth this year and will only achieve that when its regulatory, tax, trade and energy policies are fully in place, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Tuesday.

The GDP target “is certainly not achievable this year,” Ross told Reuters in an interview. “The Congress has been slow-walking everything. We don’t even have half the people in place.”

But Ross said it ultimately could be achieved in the year after all of Republican President Donald Trump’s business-friendly policies are implemented. He noted that delays were possible if the push for tax cuts was slowed down in Congress.

Ross also signaled the Trump administration would try to use existing tools to aggressively enforce trade rules and insist on fairer treatment for U.S. goods, rather than adopt the slash-and-burn approach Trump discussed on the campaign trail in 2016.

The comments appear to represent another move to the center by the administration, with Ross acknowledging that trade deficits for things like imported oil are “blameless” and not inherently bad.

Ross, a billionaire investor, said the Commerce Department is working on some “self-initiated” anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases on behalf of private industries that could help shield them from unfairly traded imports.

“I believe that enforcement will be one of the major tools for fixing things,” he said.

via Reuters

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Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse

Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.