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One day more than 30 years ago, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, the secretary of state, James Baker, flung a newspaper article at an aide, Daniel Kurtzer, and declared he was going to eject the Israeli ambassador. He was furious about a quotation he had just read from the deputy foreign minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu.
Mr Kurtzer pleaded for 24 hours to check that the quotation was accurate. He learned that Mr Netanyahu’s wording was slightly different from what had been reported, but still shocking: America, Mr Netanyahu had said, “is building its policy on a foundation of distortions and lies”. The ambassador got a reprieve, but Mr Baker declared Mr Netanyahu persona non grata and banned him from the State Department.
A few years later, in 1996, Mr Netanyahu became prime minister, and it was President Bill Clinton’s turn to be insulted. “Who the fuck does he think he is?” Mr Clinton vented to aides, after receiving a lecture on how to deal with Arabs during his first meeting with Mr Netanyahu. “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
Even Donald Trump, who as president delivered item after item on Mr Netanyahu’s wish-list, found himself blindsided by a classic Netanyahu manoeuvre to box America in. When the two men appeared in the East Room of the White House to announce a peace plan they had arrived at without Palestinian participation—the plan went nowhere—Mr Netanyahu declared it meant Israel could now annex parts of the occupied West Bank. “This was not what we had negotiated,” a flabbergasted Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law and lead negotiator, would later write in his memoir, “Breaking History”. “I grabbed my chair so intensely that my knuckles turned white, as if my grip could make Bibi stop.”
Far more than the unpractised Mr Kushner, President Joe Biden had reason to hope that his grip would be enough to restrain the prime minister, whom he had alternately jousted and joked with for decades, since back before Mr Baker imposed his ban. But since Hamas’s rampage into Israel on October 7th, Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected Mr Biden’s counsel about the war and scorned his vision for its aftermath. That is what provoked Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, to give an extraordinary, anguished speech on March 14th naming Mr Netanyahu along with Hamas as an obstacle to peace and calling for an Israeli election to oust him. Mr Netanyahu, he said, “has lost his way”.
Mr Netanyahu and other Israelis would be making a mistake to interpret the speech as just another bump in the often rocky road the allies have travelled since the founding of Israel. “This is very different,” says Mr Kurtzer, who went on to serve as the American ambassador in Cairo and then Tel Aviv. “The Israelis will need to understand that this is a wake-up call, if nothing else has persuaded them that they’re running into a problem with us.”
Mr Schumer, the highest-ranking elected Jewish official in American history, is no fair-weather friend of Israel. Back when Mr Netanyahu outraged Barack Obama’s White House by attacking Mr Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran in a speech to a joint session of Congress, Mr Schumer was one of only four Senate Democrats to vote against the deal. Mr Schumer is also no progressive. Now aged 73, he was at pains in his speech to point out that “unlike some younger Americans” he was of a generation “within living memory of the Holocaust”. He described pressing a transistor radio to his ear at high school as he fearfully tracked news of the Six Day War.
Mr Schumer is a political animal, as alert to danger in his surroundings as they come, but it is doubtful that he was worrying about Mr Biden’s chances of winning Michigan. Mr Netanyahu should worry instead that, given Mr Schumer’s political sophistication, he was correct in saying he spoke for “a silent majority” of Jewish Americans, people, he said, “who love Israel to our bones” yet take a nuanced view of the war in Gaza. Mr Schumer repeatedly condemned Hamas and a double standard in the news media that put all the blame for Palestinian suffering on Israel. But, he said, both Israel and the United States had a “moral obligation” to do more to protect Palestinian civilians: “We must be better than our enemies, lest we become them.”
Mr Netanyahu responded on March 17th by saying that calling for elections in Israel now would be like having called for elections in America in the wake of the attacks of September 11th 2001. “You don’t do that to a sister democracy, to an ally,” he told cNN. But Mr Biden has made clear that he approved of Mr Schumer’s message. “He made a good speech,” he told reporters.
Moving America
Mr Netanyahu was partly brought up and educated in America, and he prides himself on understanding how to manage its politics. “I know what America is,” he remarked once, apparently unaware he was being recorded. “America is a thing you can move very easily.” Maybe not this time. Given the polarisation of foreign policy, he can count on Republican backing, but bipartisan support of Israel has always been a bulwark of its security and, having lost Mr Schumer, Mr Netanyahu has all but lost the Democrats.
Even before Mr Schumer spoke, Mr Biden had boxed himself in, saying if Israeli forces conducted a major operation in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip they would be crossing “a red line”. He has required “credible and reliable” assurances from Israel that it is using military aid in compliance with international humanitarian law. The Americans will soon decide whether they are satisfied with those assurances. Mr Schumer has dramatically strengthened Mr Biden’s hand, should he choose to find Israel is misusing American weapons. The anger of America’s leaders is directed at Mr Netanyahu, but Israel may wind up paying the price. ■
Guests and attendeess mingle and walk through the atrium during the IMF/World Bank Group Spring Meetings at the IMF headquarters in Washington, DC, on April 24, 2025.
Jim Watson | Afp | Getty Images
After years dominated by the pandemic, supply chains, energy and inflation, there was a new topic topping the agenda at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s Spring Meetings this year: tariffs.
The IMF set the tone by kicking off the week with the release of its latest economic forecasts, which cut growth outlooks for the U.S., U.K. and many Asian countries. While economists, central bankers and politicians have been engaged in panels and behind-the-scenes talks, many are attempting to work out whether trade tensions between China and the U.S. are — or perhaps are not — cooling.
These were some of the main messages from ECB members this week.
Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank president
On inflation and monetary policy:
“We’re heading towards our [inflation] target in the course of 2025, so that disinflationary process is so much on track that we are nearing completion. But we have the shocks, you know, and the shocks will be a dampen on GDP. It’s a negative shock to demand.”
“The net impact on inflation will depend on what countermeasures are eventually taken by Europe. Then we have to take into account the [German] fiscal push by the defense investments, by the infrastructure fund.”
“We have seen successive movements, you know, announcement [of U.S. tariffs], and then a pause, and then some exemptions. So we have to be very attentive… Either we cut, either we pause, but we will be data dependent to the extreme.”
On market moves:
“When we had done our projections, we anticipated that… the dollar would appreciate, the euro would depreciate. It’s not what we saw. And there have been some counter-intuitive movements in various categories.”
“The German market has obviously been shocked in a positive way by the program soon to be put in place by the German government, with a commitment to defense, with a commitment to a big fund for infrastructure development.”
Klaas Knot, The Netherlands Bank president
On tariff uncertainty:
“If I look back over the last 14 years, in the initial days of the pandemic I think that was comparable uncertainty to what we have now.”
“In the short run, it’s crystal clear that the uncertainty that is created by the unpredictability of the tariff actions by the U.S. government works as a strong negative factor for growth. Basically, uncertainty is like a tax without revenue.”
On the inflation impact:
“In the short run, we will have lower growth. We will probably also have lower inflation. As we also see, the euro is appreciating as energy prices have also come down. So together with the sort of negative factor uncertainty in the short run, it’s crystal clear that it will accelerate the disinflation.”
“But in the medium term, the inflation outlook is not all that clear. I think there are still these negative factors. But in the medium term, you might get retaliation. You might get the disruption of global value chains, which might also be inflationary in other parts of the world than the U.S. only. And then, of course, we have the fiscal policy coming in in Europe. So this is actually a time in which you need projections.”
On a June rate cut and market pricing for two more ECB rate cuts in 2025:
“I’m fully open minded. I think it’s way too early to already take a position on June, whether it would be another cut. It will fully depend on these projections.”
“I would need to see a more structured analysis of the impact on the inflation profile ahead of us, and only then can I say whether the market is pricing fair or whether I don’t.”
Robert Holzmann, Austrian National Bank governor
On the need to wait for more data and news on tariffs:
“We have not seen this uncertainty now for years… unless the uncertainty subsides, by the right decisions, we will have to hold back a number of our decisions, and hence, we don’t know yet in what direction monetary policy should be best moved.”
“Before looking at data in detail, the question is, what kind of political decisions will be taken? Is it that we will have some tariff increases? Is it that we will have strong tariff increases? Is it that we will have retribution by high counter tariffs?”
On the ECB’s April rate cut:
“I think there’s a broad consensus [on rates]. But of course, at the margin, people differ.”
“My assessment is that at this time, it wasn’t clear yet to what extent [tariff] countermeasures were being taken. Because with countermeasures in Europe, prices may have increased. Without countermeasures, quite likely the price pressure is downward. And for the time being, we don’t know yet the direction.”
On the direction of interest rates:
“I think if the recent noises about an arrangement [on trade] were to be true, in this case, quite likely it is more towards the downside than the upside with regard to prices. But this can be changed with different decisions and the result of which, we may even imagine in [the] other direction. For the time being, no, it will be down.”
“There may be further cuts this year, but the number is still outstanding.”
Mārtiņš Kazāks, Bank of Latvia governor
On opportunity from tariffs:
“With all this uncertainty and vulnerability, this is also the time of opportunities for Europe.”
“It’s a time for Europe to grasp all the aspects of being an economic superpower and becoming a really fully-fledged political and geopolitical superpower, and this requires doing all the decisions that in the past, were not carried out fully.”
“This requires political will, political guts to make those decisions, and to strengthen the European economy and assert its place in a global world.”
On market reaction to tariffs:
“So far it seems to be relatively orderly … but if one looks at the spillovers to Europe, the financial markets are working more or less fine, we haven’t seen spreads exploding or anything like that.”
“But in terms, however, of the macro scenarios, this uncertainty is extremely elevated in the sense that, given the possible outcomes, the multiple scenarios and their probabilities are very similar with the baseline [tariff] scenario.”
US President Donald Trump speaks during a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister of Norway Jonas Gahr Store in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on April 24, 2025.
Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images
President Donald Trump denied that an aggressive bond market sell-off influenced his decision earlier this month to hold off on aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs against U.S. trading partners.
“I wasn’t worried,” Trump said in a Time magazine interview during which he was asked about financial market tumult after his April 2 “liberation day” announcement.
In the decree, Trump slapped 10% across-the-board duties against all U.S. imports and released list of tariffs against dozens of other nations. The extra levies were based on trade deficits the U.S. had against the respective countries and raised fears about inflation, a potential recession and disruption of long-held trade agreements.
Markets recoiled following the release. Treasury yields initially headed lower but quickly snapped higher. The 10-year yield rose half a percentage point in just a few days, one of its quickest moves ever, as investors also ditched stocks and the U.S. dollar.
Ultimately, Trump issued a 90-day stay on the reciprocal tariffs to allow time for negotiation. But he said it wasn’t because of the market tumult.
“No, it wasn’t for that reason,” Trump told Time in the interview from Tuesday that was published Friday. “I’m doing that until we come up with the numbers that I want to come up with. I’ve met with a lot of countries. I’ve talked on the telephone. I don’t even want them to come in.”
Yields have since moved lower, with the 10-year most recently around 4.28%, about a quarter percentage point higher than its recent low. Trump had said when he made the decision to hold off that the bond market had gotten the “yips.”
“The bond market was getting the yips, but I wasn’t. Because I know what we have,” he said. “I know what we have, but I also know we won’t have it for long if we allowed four more years of the gross incompetence. This thing was just running — it was running as a free spirit. This was — this was the most incompetent president in history.”
Though negotiations over tariffs are ongoing, Trump added that he would consider it a “total victory” even if the U.S. has levies as high as 50% still in place a year from now.
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The Bank of England is focused on the potential impact of U.S. tariffs on U.K. economic growth if there is a slowdown in global trade, the central bank’s governor Andrew Bailey said Thursday.
“We’re certainly quite focused on the growth shock,” Bailey told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in an interview at the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings.
Going into its May 8 monetary policy meeting, the central bank will consider “arguments on both sides” around the impact of tariffs on growth and domestic supply constraints on inflation, Bailey said.
“There is clearly a growth issue we start with, with weak growth … but a big question mark is how much of that is caused by the weak demand, how much of it is caused by a weak supply side,” he continued.
“Because the weak supply side, of course, unfortunately, has the sort of the upside effect on inflation. So we’ve got to balance those two. But I think the trade issue is now the new part of that story.”
Inflation could be pulled in either direction by wider forces, with a redirection of trade exports into other markets being disinflationary, but a retaliation on U.S. tariffs by the U.K. government — which he stressed did not appear likely — pushing up inflation.
Bailey added that he did not see the U.K. as being close to a recession at present, but that it was clear economic uncertainty was weighing on business and consumer confidence.
IMF downgrade
The IMF earlier this week downgraded its 2025 growth forecast for the U.K. to 1.1% from 1.6%, citing the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, higher borrowing costs and increased energy prices.
However, economic forecasting remains mired in uncertainty as countries engage in negotiations with U.S. officials over Trump’s swingeing universal tariff policy, currently on pause. The U.S. has imposed 25% tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos and a 10% levy on other British exports.
U.K. policymakers have expressed hopes of reaching a trade deal with the White House, with U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance saying there is a “good chance” of an agreement.
Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that he would be “very encouraged if the U.K. does make a deal,” but that its economy was very open and services-oriented, so it would still be impacted by a wider slowdown in growth or trade.
He also noted that inflation would increase from the current 2.6% in the coming readings due to effects from markets such as energy prices and water bills, but that the bump up would be “nothing like what we saw a few years ago.”
The Bank of England held interest rates at 4.5% at its March meeting, before Trump shocked the world with the scale of his tariff announcement.
Markets now see the BOE slashing rates to 4% by its August meeting.