Allies Worry As Trump Accuses Germany, Japan of Purposely Devaluing Currencies
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Following recent comments from President Donald Trump suggesting the U.S. is being forced to “sit there like a bunch of dummies” as it’s taken advantage of by the economic policies of China, Japan, and Germany, leaders from those countries responded this week with comments of their own.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump, along with one of his top economic advisors, unleashed what Reuters described as a “barrage of criticism” over what the two men perceive as the three key U.S. trading partners’ deliberate devaluing of their currencies — to the detriment of the American consumer.
“Every other country lives on devaluation,” the president said in a White House meeting with executives from the pharmaceutical industry. “You look at what China’s doing, you look at what Japan has done over the years. They — they play the money market, they play the devaluation market and we sit there like a bunch of dummies.”
As he did with the auto industry, Trump is pressuring pharmaceutical companies to relocate production facilities to the United States. Complaining of red tape, Trump claimed “other countries take advantage of us with their money and their money supply and devaluation.”
Prior to the president’s meeting at the White House, the head of his newly created National Trade Council, Peter Navarro, had told the Financial Times the European Union’s euro was the equivalent of an “implicit Deutshe Mark” that gave Germany an edge over the United States on trade.
Defending her country’s practices while in Stockholm, Sweden, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated Tuesday:
We don’t exercise any influence over the European Central Bank, so I can’t and I don’t want to change the situation as it is now. We strive to trade on the global market with competitive products in fair trade with all others.
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