By PAUL WISEMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate confirmed rich financier Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary Tuesday, setting up a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump’s hardline commerce polices.
On the Commerce Division, Lutnick, who was CEO on the funding agency Cantor Fitzgerald, will oversee 50,000 staff who do the whole lot from accumulating financial statistics to operating the census to issuing climate stories. However he’s seemingly to spend so much of time — together with Jamieson Greer, Trump’s nominee to be the highest U.S. commerce negotiator — managing the president’s aggressive plans to impose import taxes on U.S. buying and selling companions, together with allies and adversaries alike.
The Senate vote to verify Lutnick was 51-45.
Trump views the tariffs as a flexible financial software. They will elevate cash to finance his tax cuts elsewhere, defend U.S. industries and stress different nations into making concessions on such points as their very own commerce obstacles, immigration and drug trafficking. Mainstream economists largely view tariffs as counterproductive: They’re paid by import firms in the USA, which attempt to cross alongside the upper prices to shoppers and may thereby add to inflationary pressures all through the economic system.
At his affirmation listening to final month, Lutnick dismissed as “nonsense” the concept tariffs contribute to inflation. He expressed help for deploying across-the-board tariffs ”nation by nation” to strong-arm different nations into decreasing obstacles to American exports.
Trump final week introduced plans for “reciprocal” tariffs — elevating U.S. import tax charges to match the upper taxes that different nations impose on items from the U.S. The transfer would shatter the principles which have ruled world commerce for many years. Because the Nineteen Sixties, tariff charges have largely emerged from negotiations between dozens of nations. Trump is commandeering the method.
The president has additionally imposed 10% tariffs on Chinese language imports and successfully raised U.S. taxes on overseas metal and aluminum. He has threatened — and delayed till March 4 — 25% tariffs on items from Canada and Mexico.
Lutnick was CEO at Cantor Fitzgerald when its places of work have been hit within the Sept. 11, 2001, assault on the World Commerce Middle. The agency misplaced two-thirds of its staff — 658 individuals — that day, together with Lutnick’s brother. Howard Lutnick led the agency’s restoration and is a member of the Board of Administrators of the Nationwide September 11 Memorial & Museum.
Lutnick has promised to unload his enterprise holdings. They’re sophisticated. His monetary disclosure assertion confirmed that he had positions in additional than 800 companies and different personal organizations.
