Europe would be better off sitting at the negotiating table with the US rather than immediately imposing countermeasures on trade tariffs, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said.
“We seem to err more on what I would call a retaliatory strategy,” she told the Financial Times in an interview, stressing that the EU’s strategy last time was “not to retaliate but to negotiate.”
Lagarde echoed earlier warnings about the negative effects of an all-out trade war and said “we could offer to buy certain things from the United States and signal that we are ready to sit at the table and see how we can work together.”
“I think that’s a better scenario than a pure retaliatory strategy, which can lead to a tit-for-tat process where nobody really wins,” she said, according to a transcript of the interview published on the ECB’s website.
