Trump tariffs meant to 'level the playing field', says Goldman Sachs CEO

Trump said on Monday he will impose a 25 per cent tariff on goods imported from Canada and Mexico, effective from today

US President Donald Trump is executing on a plan to "level the playing field" that he sees as unfair by imposing tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, although the end result remains uncertain, the Goldman Sachs CEO told a conference in Australia. 

Trump said on Monday he will impose a 25 per cent tariff on goods imported from Canada and Mexico, effective Tuesday, and there was "no room left" for a deal that would avert the tariffs by curbing fentanyl flows into the United States. 

The president also reaffirmed that he will increase tariffs on Chinese imports to 20 per cent from the previous 10 per cent levy to punish Beijing for failing to halt shipments of fentanyl to the US "The president firmly believes that there are imbalances with respect to how trade exists, and he has a strong point of view that he wants to level the playing field aggressively," Goldman Sachs chair and CEO David Solomon told the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Sydney on Tuesday. 

"He's executing on that view," Solomon added. 

The bank boss said he had noticed increasingly cautious commentary from other business leaders in recent weeks, which he linked to a lack of clarity about the ultimate impact of Trump's economic policies. 

"How things stay in place, how far it goes ... is some of the uncertainty that I'm talking about," he said. 

Asked about a forecast shared at the same conference by investment giant Blackstone chair and CEO Stephen Schwarzman that the US had no chance of experiencing a recession in 2025, Solomon said: "The chance of recession in 2025 is small but it's not zero." 

Solomon said his company's decision to remove a section about diversity and inclusion in Goldman Sachs's annual filing was the result of changes pushed by the new US administration which has banned diversity, equity and inclusion policies at federal agencies. 

"With some of the changes given (with) the executive orders, and law, we have to communicate differently around these things," Solomon said. 

"That doesn't stop us from our mission to have the most extraordinary talent to serve our clients." The chief investment officer of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Edwin Cass, told the conference it was too soon to predict the outcome of Trump's tariffs on Canada, but acknowledged the US was his country's biggest export market so the countries were "tied at the hip". 

"We'll try and diversify our economy a lot more and we'll try and do some things to make it more competitive on the world stage," Cass said.  (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)