President Donald Trump’s trade war is already wiping out small American manufacturing businesses and it’s going to have a more negative impact on the US economy than most are expecting, say economists at Swiss banking giant UBS.
Tariffs imposed by Trump on Chinese goods and China’s retaliatory levies will halve the speed of GDP growth in the world’s largest economy, said Seth Carpenter, UBS’ top US-focused economist.
“We are outliers compared to the rest of Wall Street in terms of how big an effect the tariffs have on the US economy,” he said in London on Thursday at the launch of the bank’s 2019 Global Economic Outlook. “We expect a material slowing in the fourth quarter of this year — so right now — into the first quarter of next year.”
