US presidential election looms over IMF and World Bank annual meetings
abcnews.go.comGlobal finance leaders are facing a major uncertainty as they meet in Washington next week: Who will win the U.S. presidential election and shape the policies of the world’s biggest economy
WASHINGTON — Global finance leaders face a major uncertainty as they meet in Washington next week: Who will win the U.S. presidential election and shape the policies of the world’s biggest economy?
Republican nominee former President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have spoken little about their plans for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. But their differing views on trade, tariffs and other economic issues will be on the minds of the finance leaders as they attend the financial institutions' annual meetings.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva alluded to what’s at stake in a curtain-raiser speech Thursday ahead of the meetings.
Without naming Trump, she warned that “major players, driven by national security concerns, are increasingly resorting to industrial policy and protectionism, creating one trade restriction after another.”
She said trade “will not be the same engine of growth as before,” warning that trade restrictions are “like pouring cold water on an already-lukewarm world economy.”
Trump promises as president to impose a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods and a “universal’’ tariff of 10% or 20% on everything else that enters the United States, insisting that the cost of taxing imported goods is absorbed by the foreign countries that produce those goods.
However, mainstream economists say they actually amount to a tax on American consumers that would make the economy less efficient and send inflation surging in the United States.
Trump has also embraced isolationism
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