Anthony Scaramucci, the outspoken investment banker and former White House Communications Director, criticized the Trump administration's enduring trade disputes, arguing the tariffs ultimately hurt the American people.
"The current trade war and the strategy of using tariffs is a flawed strategy," Scaramucci told Cheddar on Tuesday.
Scaramucci said that tariffs, which are essentially taxes, especially hurt Americans making less that $100,000 annually. "They eat up their living standards," he said.
Scaramucci is a prominent New York financier and the founder of Skybridge Capital. He served a brief stint as White House Communications Director in 2017, which gave him what he called an "11-day PhD" on Washington culture. His tenure was cut extremely short after he gave an interview to The New Yorker in which he criticized other members of the administration with expletives and derogatory language.
"By using the tariffs, you have this effect of slowing down the economy and creating a level of unpredictability for CEOs large and small around America," Scaramucci said.
Since taking office, Trump has threatened punitive tariffs against several countries ranging from Mexico to India. The White House most notably implemented tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports in 2018, and has threatened to levy more on an addition $300 billion worth of goods.
Dating app Bumble announced its first acquisition, expanding into Europe by picking up Fruitz, a French Platform. The Fruitz app allows its users to convey dating preferences through fruit metaphors.
Meat production giant Tyson Foods reported a beat on its Q1 earnings. In spite of obstacles posed by supply chain issues and inflation, the company exceeded expectations on earnings per share and revenue.
TC BioPharm, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing cell therapy products targeting, went public on the Nasdaq in January. CEO Bryan Kobel joined Cheddar to talk about the company's IPO launch, its cancer-fighting therapeutics tech, and its potential for using its research to treat COVID-19. "The opportunity here for us is to really get safety data and covid and expand into other areas," Kobel said. "So from COVID, where we hope to treat patients, hopefully maybe the elderly population, populations that that really can't handle the antivirals because they're too hard in the system, well then we'll expand out into maybe severe influenza Ebola, other viral and viral infections where we think we can be helpful."
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
Following the surprising big beat on estimates for the January jobs report, William M. Rodgers III, vice president and director of the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, joined Cheddar News to break down the data. “We ended 2021 with a strong crescendo to a recovery that had taken hold, and we started 2022 in good fashion." He also discussed the dueling pressures of wage growth and inflation.
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
