President Donald Trump recognizes the crowd as the 47th President of the United States in the rotunda of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025.
Shawn Thew | About Reuters
Minister of Commerce Howard Lutnick argued on Wednesday that former President Joe Biden – not his boss, President Donald Trump – was responsible for the latest negative economic data and a fall of the share prices.
“The President spoke about it last night,” said Lutnick in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “He said Biden left him a bunch of Poop.”
“He gave him a large part of the economy [Trump’s] I try to repair, “said Lutnick.
Trump in a speech to a joint congress meeting on Tuesday evening said that Biden had left him an “economic disaster” and an “Inflations alb dream” to deal with.
In fact, the US economy grew by 2.8%last year, and the inflation rate in December was 2.9%-below the 40-year high of 9.1%in June 2022.
Lutnick's comments came when Bloomberg asked him after “data in the past few weeks that had not been great”, as well as the concerns that Trump's massive new tariffs for Canada and Mexico will bring economic growth and share prices to stand.
“You look at biden data,” replied Lutnick.
“Don't try to smear nonsense my president Trump with bidges,” said Lutnick.
“We are in mid -March,” he said. “My president took over on January 20th. Do you believe that the economic data is from Donald Trump-related data in early March?”
“Come on. You have to kid me,” he said. “Stop it, stop it, stop it.”
Lutnick urged whether he argued that disturbing economic data was misleading and said: “I think that data is understood that they are in difficulties if Joe Biden were still responsible.”
“But they have a new president, they have a new sheriff,” said Lutnick. “You see the investments, you see that it already produces trillion dollars that move to America.”
On Wednesday, the salary accounting company ADP reported that companies only added 77,000 new employees in February, far below the number of 186,000 employees in January and almost half of the Dow Jones Consensus estimate for the month.
On Monday and Tuesday, the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average collided by more than 1,300 points.
The US trade secretary Howard Lutnick speaks as President Donald Trump, left, listens to the White House in Washington, DC, March 3, 2025 during an investment advertisement.
Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty pictures
Also on Monday, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta made a forecast in which the gross domestic product decreased by 2.8% in the first quarter of 2025, which is due to -1.5% of the past week. The GDPnow estimate of the Atlanta Fed in mid-February forecast an increase of 2.3%.
And last week the conference board reported that the US consumer confidence in February, which was Trump's first full month in the White House, fell greatly. The 7-point decline was the largest decline in the consumer since August 2021.
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Wednesday was not the first time that Lutnick tried to distance between the White House of Trump and Economic Data that it doesn't like.
On Sunday he suggested that the administration could change the way the gross domestic product is tabular.
“You know that governments historically played with GDP,” said Lutnick in Fox News. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I will separate these two and make them transparent.”
The idea was quickly planned by economists. The outbreak of government expenditure as a separate category of consumer expenditure in GDP calculations could “make a fundamental measure of the health of the US economy to potentially difficult or distort,” said the Associated Press.
However, the idea has at least one top -class fan: Elon Musk.
Musk, whose so -called Ministry of Government Efficiency carries out a crusade to reduce the workforce of the Federal Government and its budget, tweeted: “A more precise level of GDP would rule out government spending.”
“Otherwise, you can artificially scale GDP by spending money on things that do not make people's lives better,” wrote Musk.
Lutnick's proposal that the economic data was open to the political revision is part of a wider campaign by the Trump administration against the recording and distribution of government data.
Last week Lutnick dissolved two expert committees who worked with the government to create economic statistics, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
One of them, the advisory committee for economic statistics, helped the creation of data on inflation, employment and gross domestic product.
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