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Marina von Neumann Whitman Dead: International Trade Expert Was 90

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She was the first woman to serve on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. At General Motors, she became one of the highest-ranking women in corporate America.Marina von Neumann Whitman, an expert in international trade who in 1972 became the first woman to be appointed to the White House Council of Economic Advisers and who later was one of the few women to join the executive leadership at General Motors, died on May 20 in Concord, Mass. She was 90.Her son, Malcolm Whitman, said her death, in a hospital, was from complications of pneumonia.Dr. Whitman was just 36 when President Richard M. Nixon nominated her for his three-person economic council, making her the highest-ranking woman in his administration.“As a woman, she will be outnumbered on the council two to one, but not in terms of brains,” the president said in the Oval Office with Dr. Whitman and her family by his side. (The council’s other members at the time were Herbert Stein and Ezra Solomon.)Dr. Whitman was an academic economist by training — she taught at the University of Pittsburgh and later at the University of Michigan — but she alternated her work in the classroom with extensive stints in the public and corporate sectors.Dr. Whitman in 2010. Over the years she alternated her work in the classroom, as a professor of economics, with stints in the public and corporate sectors.Scott R. Galvin, Michigan Photography, University of MichiganBefore joining the Council of Economic Advisers, she had worked for it as a staff economist and then served on the president’s board overseeing price controls.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump’s Tariffs Will Drag Down the Global Economy, OECD Says

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    Economic growth will slow this year and next as the trade war hampers development in the United States and around the world, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said.President Trump’s trade war is expected to slow growth in the world’s leading economies, including the United States, this year and in the years to come, unless world leaders can resolve their differences over trade.The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development slashed its outlook for global output to 2.9 percent this year, from 3.3 percent in 2024, the organization said in its economic report released on Tuesday.Economic growth in the United States is expected to be particularly weak, the organization said, rising 1.6 percent this year, a drop from the 2.2 percent projected in March, and 1.5 percent in 2026, down from its previous estimate of 1.6 percent. The U.S. economy grew 2.8 percent in 2024.“Through to the end of 2024, the global economy showed real resilience,” said Mathias Cormann, the organization’s secretary general. “But the global economic environment has become significantly more challenging since.”In the first three months of the year, economic growth in the countries monitored by the organization, which is based in Paris, “dropped abruptly” to 0.1 percent from the last three months of 2024, which is “the slowest rate of growth since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic some five years ago,” Mr. Cormann said.Since taking office, Mr. Trump has imposed tariffs, then halted them for several weeks, then reinstated some, in the hopes of winning new trade deals from once-close allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union, as well as longtime rivals like China.The lack of certainty coming from that on-again, off-again strategy, combined with frequent changes in how high the tariffs will eventually be, has roiled markets and disrupted the flow of goods and services around the world. From January to March, many companies rushed goods to the United States, hoping to avoid the higher tariffs, many of which are now set to take effect in July.Even if the Trump administration increases tariffs on most of America’s trading partners by just 10 percent, it would shave 1.6 percent off economic growth in the country over two years, the report said. Growth on a global scale would contract nearly a full percentage point in the same period.Further pressure is coming from the need for leading economies, such as those in the European Union, to increase military spending while also investing in the transition to a green economy, the report said.The economies of the 20 countries using the common euro currency are projected to grow 1 percent in 2025 and 1.2 percent in 2026, in line with the O.E.C.D. forecast from March. China’s economy is expected to see 4.7 percent growth this year and 4.3 percent in 2026, down 0.1 percentage points from the organization’s spring projection.Economists in the organization urged countries to reach agreements on trade and to increase investment to revive economic growth.“Our key recommendation, to all governments, is to engage with each other to address issues in a global trading system cooperatively,” Mr. Cormann said. More

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    Tariff Truce With China Demonstrates the Limits of Trump’s Aggression

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    President Trump’s triple-digit tariffs on Chinese products disrupted global trade — but haven’t appeared to result in major concessions from Beijing.President Trump’s decision to impose, and then walk back, triple-digit tariffs on Chinese products over the past month demonstrated the power and global reach of U.S. trade policy. But it was also another illustration of the limitations of Mr. Trump’s aggressive approach.The tariffs on Chinese goods, which the United States ratcheted up to a minimum of 145 percent in early April, brought much trade between the countries to a standstill. They caused companies to reroute business globally, importing less from China and more from other countries like Vietnam and Mexico. They forced Chinese factories to shutter, and brought some American importers to the verge of bankruptcy.The tariffs ultimately proved too painful to American businesses for Mr. Trump to sustain. Within weeks, Trump officials were saying that the tariffs the president had chosen to impose on one of America’s largest trading partners were unsustainable, and that they were angling to reduce them.Trade talks between the world’s largest economies in Geneva this weekend concluded with an agreement to reduce stiff levies on each other’s products by more than many analysts had anticipated. Chinese imports will face a minimum tax of 30 percent, down from 145 percent. China will lower its import duty on American goods to 10 percent from 125 percent. The two countries also agreed to hold talks to stabilize the relationship.It remains to be seen what agreements can be reached in future negotiations. But the talks this weekend, and the tariff chaos of the past month, did not appear to generate any other immediate concessions from the Chinese other than a commitment to keep talking. That has called into question whether the trade disruptions of the past month — which led many American businesses to cancel orders for Chinese imports, freeze expansion plans and warn of higher prices — were worth it.“The Geneva agreement represents an almost complete U.S. retreat that vindicates Xi’s decision to forcefully retaliate,” said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, referring to Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Can President Trump Turn Back the Economic Clock?

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    Historians make their names by persuading people to see patterns in the chaos. In the late 1970s, the French historian Fernand Braudel thought that one of those patterns was about to repeat. Braudel was a student of the slow-moving currents that shape events. He wanted people to pay less attention to great men like Napoleon and more to seemingly humble things like the potato, a New World import that made it easier for European farmers to grow more food than they needed; this surplus, in turn, gave a wider array of Europeans time to engage in new hobbies like complaining about their rulers. One might say that he regarded the potato as the cause of Napoleon.Listen to this article, read by Malcolm HillgartnerIn the third volume of his epic “Civilization and Capitalism,” published in 1979, Braudel explored the forces that made one city at a time the economic center of the Western world, from Venice to Amsterdam to London, and then inexorably lifted up another in its place. He wrote that cities rose as centers of commerce, and then, as they prospered, they began to invest their surpluses in building new centers, engineering their own declines. Commerce moved on, leaving a financial hub behind.Braudel’s account ended with the decline of Amsterdam, the entrepôt of Europe through the 17th and into the 18th century, a city of astonishing wealth and diversity. Wide-eyed visitors wrote of its wonders with the same astonishment as later generations would write of New York. The young czar of Russia went home so impressed that he built St. Petersburg in its image. But as Amsterdam grew fat and happy, its merchants became bankers and began to seek better returns in fast-growing London. Amsterdam, Braudel wrote, became “a society of rentier investors on the lookout for anything that would guarantee a quiet and privileged life,” a society that had moved on “from the healthy tasks of economic life to the more sophisticated games of the money market.”Braudel noted that London, too, eventually ceded its role, underwriting the rise of New York in the early 20th century. And in the late 1970s, he judged that New York was entering the “autumn” of its era as the center of the global economy. Commerce and industry were fleeing the city, leaving behind a thriving financial center — a sure sign in Braudel’s view that New York, and the nation it anchored, were on the edge of decline.Donald Trump became Donald Trump in that city, building towers and bankrupting casinos as Wall Street boomed and the working class faded away, and he emerged with a similarly bleak view of America’s prospects. His career as a political figure has been built on his conviction that America is losing its wealth and its power. If Ronald Reagan filled voters with hope, Trump offers to keep them company in their misery. He has an intuition for the things that people fear and is comfortable saying what other politicians won’t. Where other presidents intone that it’s still Morning in America, Trump has touched a nerve by insisting that it’s not long before midnight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘People Who Are Salaried Are Crying’: Taxes on Workers Add to Debt Misery

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    The pay stubs tell the story. Hefty deductions to help cover the cost of Kenya’s new funds for affordable housing and health insurance. More money subtracted for jacked-up contributions to the National Social Security Fund and an increase in the tax rate.In a matter of months, Kenyans with a 45,000-shilling-a-month salary — roughly $350 — saw their take-home pay shrink 9 percent, to $262.Pay stubs for an employee at Shining Hope for Communities, a nonprofit in Kenya:JUNE 2024JANUARY 2025“People who are salaried are crying,” said Kennedy Odede, the founder of a self-help association in Nairobi’s Kibera slum.The increased payroll taxes are one element of President William Ruto’s desperate bid to raise revenue to keep the government running and pay off Kenya’s staggering foreign debt.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Why the Economic Disruption From Trump’s Tariff War Will Be Hard to Reverse

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    The president’s turnover of the economic order has unleashed changes that could prove lasting, because other countries will adjust.President Trump has made clear his intent to smash the reigning global economic order. And in 100 days, he has made remarkable progress in accomplishing that goal.Mr. Trump has provoked a trade war, scrapped treaties and suggested that Washington might not defend Europe. He is also dismantling the governmental infrastructure that has provided the know-how and experience.The changes have been deep. But the world is still churning. Midterm elections in two years could erode the Republican majority in Congress. And Mr. Trump’s reign is constitutionally mandated to end in four years. Could the next president come in and undo what the Trump administration has done?As Cardinal Michael Czerny, a close aide to Pope Francis, said of the Catholic Church: “There is nothing that we have done over 2,000 years that couldn’t be rolled back.”The same could be said of global geopolitics. Yet even at this early stage, historians and political scientists agree that on some crucial counts, the changes wrought by Mr. Trump may be hard to reverse.Like the erosion of trust in the United States, a resource that took generations to build.“The MAGA base and JD Vance will still be around long after Trump’s gone,” said Ian Goldin, professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford. No matter who occupies the White House next, the conditions that propelled the “Make America Great Again” movement — widening inequality and economic insecurity — remain. For the rest of the world, there is still a worry, he said, that there could be “another Trump in the future.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    IMF Expects Trump’s Tariffs Will Slow Global Economic Growth

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    President Trump’s trade war is expected to slow economic growth across the globe this year, in large part because his aggressive use of tariffs is likely to weigh heavily on the United States, the world’s largest economy.The economic projections were released on Tuesday by the International Monetary Fund, in the wake of Mr. Trump’s decision to raise tariffs to levels not seen since the Great Depression.The president has imposed a 10 percent tariff on nearly all imports, along with punishing levies of at least 145 percent on Chinese goods that come into the United States. Mr. Trump also imposed what he calls “reciprocal” tariffs on America’s largest trading partners, including the European Union, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, although he has paused those until July as his administration works to secure bilateral trade deals.Mr. Trump’s approach has created paralyzing uncertainty for U.S. companies that export products abroad or rely on foreign inputs for their goods, dampening output just as economies around the world were stabilizing after years of crippling inflation. China and Canada have already retaliated against Mr. Trump’s tariffs with their own trade barriers, and the European Union has said it is prepared to increase levies if the United States goes ahead with its planned 20 percent tax.The World Economic Outlook report projects that global output will slow to 2.8 percent this year from 3.3 percent in 2024. In January, the fund forecast that growth would hold steady in 2025.The I.M.F. also expects output to be slower next year than it previously predicted.Much of the downgrade for this year can be attributed to the impact of the tariffs on the U.S. economy, which was already poised to lose momentum this year. The I.M.F. expects U.S. output to slow to 1.8 percent in 2025, down from 2.8 percent last year. That is nearly a full percentage point slower than the 2.7 percent growth that the I.M.F. forecast for the United States in January, when it was the strongest economy in the world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Fed Under Pressure as Inflation Expectations Surge

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    Federal Reserve officials have had one clear message since President Trump sharply escalated the global trade war this month. Keeping inflation expectations in check as price pressures rise is their No. 1 priority.On Friday, they faced a big setback.A new survey released by the University of Michigan found that as consumer sentiment took another nosedive because of fears associated with Mr. Trump’s tariffs, expectations about inflation — in the year ahead and over a longer time horizon — jumped sharply.Over the next 12 months, respondents now expect inflation to surge to 6.7 percent, the highest reading since 1981 and a significant increase from the March level of 5 percent. In five years’ time, they are bracing for inflation to stay stuck above 4 percent. The Fed’s goal is 2 percent inflation.There are reasons to take this data with a grain of salt. For one, the survey tends to reflect political biases. Since Mr. Trump returned to the White House, Democrats, once optimistic about the outlook, have turned much more downbeat, about not only inflation but also growth and the labor market. Republicans, meanwhile, have flipped from being far more pessimistic during Biden’s presidency to much more positive.On the margins, that political divide may be beginning to narrow, with the decline in sentiment in April “pervasive and unanimous across age, income, education, geographic region and political affiliation,” according to Joanne W. Hsu, director of the consumer surveys. Independents are also starting to change their opinions in a distinct way, accounting for a large part of the rise in longer-run inflation expectations.What has helped to somewhat alleviate concerns about the survey findings is the fact that market measures of longer-run inflation expectations, which are based on U.S. government bonds, have stayed far more stable. The divergence has been so stark as to prompt Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, to refer to the University of Michigan survey as an “outlier,” as recently as last month.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Inside Trump’s Reversal on Tariffs: From ‘Be Cool!’ to ‘Getting Yippy’

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    Economic turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields, caused President Trump to reverse course on the steep levies.For the past week, President Trump has been urging calm in the face of the financial chaos that he created and resisting calls for him to rethink his approach.“I know what the hell I’m doing,” he told Republicans on Tuesday as the massive tariffs he had imposed sent global markets into a tailspin. “BE COOL!” he said in a social media post on Wednesday morning. “Everything is going to work out well.”At 9:37 a.m. Wednesday, the president was still bullish on his policy, posting on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”But in the end, it was the markets that got him to reverse course.The economic turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields, caused Mr. Trump to blink on Wednesday afternoon and pause his “reciprocal” tariffs for most countries for the next 90 days, according to four people with direct knowledge of the president’s decision.Asked to explain the decision, Mr. Trump told reporters: “Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”Behind the scenes, senior members of Mr. Trump’s team had feared a financial panic that could spiral out of control and potentially devastate the economy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others on the president’s team, including Vice President JD Vance, had been pushing for a more structured approach to the trade conflict that would focus on isolating China as the worst actor while still sending a broader message that Mr. Trump was serious about cracking down on trade imbalances.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More