(Reuters) -A top economist for Goldman Sachs on Wednesday signaled no plans to change how his team conducts and publishes its research after President Donald Trump lashed out at the Wall Street firm and its chief executive because of the research team’s estimate that American consumers would bear the brunt of the costs of Trump’s tariffs.
Chief U.S. Economist David Mericle’s defense of his team’s work came a day after Trump in a social media post said Goldman Chief Executive David Solomon should “not bother running a major financial institution” and lambasted the bank’s economics research. The report Trump attacked, published August 10, estimated that U.S. consumers so far have borne less than a quarter of the cost of Trump’s tariffs but that share would rise to two-thirds if the tariffs play out in the same way they had previously.
Trump, by contrast, insists that foreign companies and governments are absorbing the cost of tariffs that now average the highest in about a century, and that American households are unscathed. He attacked Goldman and its economists for making “a bad prediction.”
Asked in a CNBC interview whether Trump’s broadside had had a chilling effect on his team’s work, Mericle said: “We’re just trying to do the best economic forecast that we can for our clients, and we publish research reports like the one that we published over the weekend to inform those views. And we’ll keep doing that.”
(Reporting by Dan Burns; Editing by Mark Porter and Andrea Ricci)
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