Donald Trump delivered Inauguration Day remarks after being sworn in as the 47th US president, shedding light on what investors can expect during the first 100 days of his second administration. Tariffs, a topic that was central to Trump's campaign, did not make it into Trump's inauguration speech on Monday.
Wiley Rein's national security practice chair, Nazak Nikakhtar, is the former US Department of Commerce Assistant Secretary, nominated by Trump in 2018. Nikakhtar joins Yahoo Finance's special inauguration coverage with Julie Hyman and Seana Smith to examine the president's decision not to focus on tariff plans on Day 1.
"Everybody — our allies, our trading partners, certainly US industry — they're all waiting at the edge of their seats to determine what kind of tariffs the president is going to impose," Nikakhtar says. "But the delay should also give everybody confidence."
"There are a multitude of ways that we have ... to impose tariffs on our trading partners," the former Trump administration Commerce Department official explains. "The reason that the president is waiting, I think, he's carefully evaluating the various legal authorities, matching them up against facts, waiting to determine which authority is the best to alleviate the inflationary nervousness and impact."
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"These aren't ... decisions that one can make overnight. Certainly, there are distortions; certainly, there are tariff authorities, but calibrating which authority to use to impose what tariffs at what level is something that does take time [and] consideration."
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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.