Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen plans to warn in a speech on Thursday that the economic policies being proposed by former President Donald J. Trump would fuel inflation and harm businesses, raising alarm about the risks of blanket tariffs.
The critique, which is set to be delivered in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations, comes less than a month before the presidential election. Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have outlined starkly different views about how they see America’s role in the global economy. Although Ms. Yellen is not expected to mention Mr. Trump by name, she will argue that the broad tariffs the former president and some Republicans in Congress support would damage the U.S. economy.
“Calls for walling America off with high tariffs on friends and competitors alike or by treating even our closest allies as transactional partners are deeply misguided,” Ms. Yellen plans to say in her speech, which was obtained by The New York Times. “Sweeping, untargeted tariffs would raise prices for American families and make our businesses less competitive.”
Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign products during his presidency, but his plans if he is re-elected would dwarf those moves. On previous occasions, Mr. Trump suggested imposing tariffs of 10 to 20 percent on most foreign items, as well as a tariff of 60 percent or more on goods from China, in addition to other levies.
This week, Mr. Trump suggested he might impose across-the-board tariffs of as much as 50 percent to force foreign companies to produce in the United States to avoid the levies.
“The most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “It’s my favorite word.”
The Harris campaign has offered few details about Ms. Harris’s trade policies, but the vice president has argued that Mr. Trump’s tariffs are excessive and that they would raise costs on most Americans.
Still, the Biden administration has kept Mr. Trump’s tariffs on China in place and has added new ones to the mix.
The Treasury secretary rarely mentions Mr. Trump publicly, but she engaged with him while he was president in her former role as Federal Reserve chair. Mr. Trump decided not to appoint Ms. Yellen to another term in the job, instead choosing Jerome H. Powell.
Ms. Yellen has been a longtime skeptic of tariffs. She has described them as “taxes on consumers” and has argued that some of the tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on Chinese imports should be reversed.
Those arguments went unheeded during debates among White House economists and officials in the Office of the United States Trade Representative. In May, the Biden administration announced a sharp increase in tariffs on an array of Chinese imports, including electric vehicles, solar cells, semiconductors and advanced batteries. He also endorsed maintaining tariffs on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods that were put in place by Mr. Trump.
Ms. Yellen has said the new tariffs were justified because they were “targeted” and necessary to protect the green energy technology industries that the Biden administration has been trying to develop with subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. She has argued that China’s excess industrial capacity threatens these sectors, and on Thursday she plans to accuse China of engaging in “unfair trade practices”
“Trade and investment with China can bring significant gains to American firms and workers and must be maintained,” Ms. Yellen is set to say on Thursday. “But we must also have a healthy economic relationship based on a level playing field.”
Although Ms. Yellen generally avoids wading into politics, it is evident that she is concerned that a second Trump administration would jeopardize the work she has done to strengthen economic ties with U.S. allies. A hallmark of Ms. Yellen’s tenure at Treasury has been a policy that she called “friend shoring,” which entailed making supply chains less reliant on adversarial countries such as China and Russia and more dependent on economies such as those in Europe.
Mr. Trump has threatened to upend that approach with blanket tariffs on imports. During an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago this week, Mr. Trump complained about the U.S. trade deficit with the European Union and said nations traditionally considered to be friendly had been mistreating America.
“Our allies have taken advantage of us more so than our enemies,” Mr. Trump said.
But on Thursday, Ms. Yellen plans to make the case that the United States would struggle to address challenges such China’s trade practices or Russia’s disruption of global energy markets without allies like Europe.
“We cannot even hope to advance our economic and security interests — such as opposing Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine — if we go it alone,” Ms. Yellen is expected to say.
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