Larry Summers on Trump, Tariffs, and Threats to the Economy

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Where do things stand a month after Trump's “Liberation Day” tariffs and the announcements that have followed? In a thoughtful and wide-ranging Conversation, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers shares his perspective on the economic and political consequences of the tariffs—and the threats to financial markets. According to Summers, our difficulties now go beyond any individual economic policy pronouncement by the Trump administration: “The issue is becoming, in a meta sense, confidence in the United States. When people go in and out of being confident in you, that is alarming. It’s the kind of thing that in a developing country, you’d ask yourself whether they’re going to have to have an IMF program within a few months. We’re too big for an IMF program, but we're at risk of a major kind of a financial incident.” Warning that the administration already has “done a substantial amount of damage,” Summers argues that “we may work our way through this, but only if there’s very substantial alarm and very substantial reversal.”

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to conversations.
0:18.0	I'm very pleased to be joined again, actually for the fourth time on this
0:20.9	series of conversations by Larry Summers, the very distinguished economist, Harvard University
0:26.4	professor, former Secretary of the Treasury, former director of the National Economic Council.
0:31.7	Larry, we haven't done this for a few years. In February 2021, we had our last conversation, and you very early warned that you were
0:41.2	worried about inflation, going to being much higher than people expected, and a political point of view,
0:46.4	doing more damage to the Biden presidency that expected. So that was prescient. Anyway, thank you for
0:53.0	joining me again. I don't mean to remind people of it.
0:55.6	Good to be, good to be with you and good to have one of the accurate predictions I made remembered.
1:03.1	It's not that 100% of them have been accurate over time.
1:07.5	Well, who's our, especially in this day of age.
1:10.6	I was very struck by I want to
1:11.8	talk about the current economic moment and especially about your alarm about it if I
1:16.9	can put it that way you you aren't you've seen an awful lot of things come and go you've
1:20.5	seen a lot of presidents make policy mistakes and you know we pay a price for those
1:24.3	mistakes but that price is whatever it is you know point something percent of GDP or something else you know, we pay a price for those mistakes, but that price is whatever it is, you know, point something percent of GDP or something else, you know.
1:31.3	But you were a couple of weeks ago, you talked about your genuine alarm at what was happening in the markets.
1:37.3	You said, what, not quite as scary as the financial crisis or right after the pandemic, but the next thing to that. And that was the
1:46.7	week, that was particularly rocky week for the financial markets when the tariffs had been put
1:50.5	on and not yet partly taken off. But I'm really curious and asking you this sort of as much
1:57.5	as a former Secretary of the Treasury and NEC had as economist.
2:01.3	I mean, which is why your alarm got me alarmed.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Conversations with Bill Kristol, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Conversations with Bill Kristol and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.