Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich warned that the tariffs from President Donald Trump’s economic policy agenda could signal the end of American influence in the world.
In a recent episode of “The Bottom Line,” Reich, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said when global investors, including Americans, started pulling their money out of Treasury bills and away from U.S. dollars after the tariffs were announced, America’s standing in the world may have wavered.
The U.S. dollar and Treasury bills are the safest places in the world to hold money, Reich said. If that changes, the U.S. would “lose power and we would also lose a lot of wealth in this country,” he said.
“Having the dollar be the reserve currency helps all of us Americans here because we get, in a sense, a free ride,” Reich said. “We get the benefits of the rest of the global economy investing in us.” He questioned why the Trump administration would want to create policies that end this American hegemony sooner than might have otherwise happened.
Reich also said the tariffs are hardest on Americans with lower incomes.
“Every consumer, effectively, is poorer,” he said. “It is a regressive tax in the sense that consumers who have lower incomes … have to pay a larger portion of their incomes in the form of this tariff tax.”
Watch the video to hear more from Robert Reich about the future of manufacturing in America, immigration, and what companies can do to protect their bottom lines.
