By Shawn Langlois, MarketWatch
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‘I think his timing is just his own personal timing for this: He’s been president for a year, it’s about time he does something that gets people’s excitement going. He has a philosophy of life that that’s what you have to do: If you want to stay famous, celebrity — which he obviously relishes — you’ve got to be constantly creating news.’
That’s what Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist Robert Shiller said to CNBC over the weekend about the president’s role in the ramp-up in U.S.-China trade tensions.
Speaking in Beijing Saturday, Shiller went on to slam Trump as a “showman,” whose actions are “totally unbecoming for a president.”
He warned that the “chaos” brought by a trade war could have a devastating impact.
“The immediate thing will be an economic crisis because these enterprises are built on long-term planning, they’ve developed a skilled workforce and ways of doing things,” Shiller told CNBC. “We have to rediscover these things in whatever country after the imports are cut off.”
Watch the interview:
On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average /zigman2/quotes/210598065/realtime DJIA +1.76% and the S&P 500 /zigman2/quotes/210599714/realtime SPX +2.47% , on the heels of their worst weekly performance in years, both surged on reports the U.S. and China are conducting behind-the-scenes talks to avert a global trade war. For more on the market’s big day, read Market Snapshot.
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