Former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Gives His Take On Trump’s ‘End Game’ For Tariffs

On "Forbes Newsroom", former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross discussed President Trump's goals for his tariffs.

Transcript

00:00You're a lifelong businessman. Are you one of those people who are worried? I mean,

00:05when you're looking at this, what do you think the endgame is?

00:10Well, I think it's clear the endgame has multiple dimensions to it. One part of the endgame,

00:18he definitely wants to reduce our trade deficit and reduce it quite materially. Number two,

00:27he is particularly interested in toning down the Chinese exports to us. Number three,

00:39so those are the big tariff things. However, he's also got some other objectives. These numbers are

00:48so big that they also are generating meaningful revenues to the US government that can be used to

00:57offset tax cuts and other things that the president wants to undertake. We didn't have that as a big

01:05objective last time. And then finally, he's also broadening it to deal with non-trade, non-cash

01:16diplomatic objectives, like controlling fentanyl, like border security, like making larger contributions to

01:27NATO. So part of the reason people are feeling a bit uncertain is they see that he has multiple

01:37objectives. But there's nothing that will stop him from accomplishing all of those objectives. It's

01:46just he's throwing a lot of people all at one time. And I think that's good because he doesn't have that

01:54much time to make these things happen. So he might as well really launch a big broad offensive.