The White House protectionist policy could hit the US more violently than Europe in the short term. Banco SantanderThe executive chair told CNBC on Thursday as tariffs hit domestic consumers.
“Tax (taxes). Taxes on consumers,” AnaBotín said in an interview with Karen Tso of CNBC in Brussels about the bystanders of the 2025 IIF European Summit. “In the end, the economy will pay a price. There will be less growth, more inflation, and the others will be equal.”
President Donald Trump has imposed many tariffs on imports into the United States since his second administration began in January, and has sometimes been suspended or cancelled. He is seeking to promote domestic manufacturing between the world’s largest economy and its commercial partners and reduce the trade deficit.
Botin not only warns about the negative impact of tariffs on the US, but many analysts say the job could ultimately cause higher inflation and put a strain on the wallets of US consumers.
“By relative standards, in the short term, Europe is less affected than the US,” Botin said Thursday.
The imposing of blankets and country-specific obligations, including news on Wednesday’s 25% tariffs on all car imports into the United States effective from April 2, led to numerous retaliatory measures, including the European Union, the US historic horizontal Western ally.
The bloc has also taken steps to critically relax the previously iron-covered fiscal rules and strengthen its autonomy through a series of proposals that could mobilize 800 billion euros ($863.8 billion) towards higher defensive spending in the region.
“Banks in Europe today are ready to lend more and support the economy more. We are strong. We have capital,” Botin said. She also called for more “flexibility” to limit minimum capital requirements to strengthen resilience in the EU regulations, where European lenders are currently deciding on “buffers”;
Germany’s measures to overhaul its latest EU plans and long-standing debt policies to meet enhanced security spending have boosted German and European defence stocks in recent weeks.
However, Germany relies heavily on the troubling automotive sector. The world’s third largest exporter is vulnerable to severe changes in trade patterns and could be exposed to the risk of a recession as a result of US tariffs, German Central Bank governor Joachim Nagel warned earlier this month.
Botin – The Bank is the fifth-largest car lender in the United States, pushing to expand its transatlantic crossing while closing its physical branches in the UK, but has drawn an optimistic picture of the state of the European economy.
“As of today, Germany is one third of the eurozone economy, so I believe the US will slow more than Europe. That’s a big deal. It acknowledges that recent unpredictability has more cloudy clarity than the European Central Bank’s next financial policy phase.
It is widely expected that the central bank will advance 25 points interest rate cuts at its next meeting on April 17th. In addition, monetary policy was eased in early March, signaling that policies from that era were “less restrictive in meaning.”
“The fundamentals of the economy are strong, but uncertainty and volatility (Are) at the historic level is a very difficult decision. Therefore, tariffs are undoubtedly taxes on consumers.
“We don’t know how slow it is growing, how high the inflation rate is. But when you don’t know what will happen in the next few months, you will wait to buy a car, you will wait to buy a fridge.
Botin added, “…there are cases where the fees are lower, but perhaps not that fast.”
ECB policymaker Pierre Unche also spoke with CNBC’s TSO to show that the US tariff war has hindered bank decisions.
“If we forgot the tariffs… we were going in the right direction. Then the question was the issue of the pace of the cut and the fine-tuning where we were going to land,” he said. “I think inflation could be a boring part of (20)25, and (20)25 was not a boring year. But adding tariffs to the equation is getting more complicated.”
