Larry Kudlow is a CNBC contributor and on-air personality. (Source: CNN)(RNN) – Larry Kudlow, a CNBC contributor and on-air personality, has been tapped to serve as the director of the White House’s National Economic Council.
Kudlow told the Associated Press that he’s accepted the position.
He’s a free trade supporter and has in the past firmly opposed the kind of sweeping tariffs on imported steel and aluminum that President Donald Trump has instituted.
However, he is “in accord” with Trump’s policies, the AP said.
Trump said in brief remarks Tuesday that he would be OK with someone who doesn’t agree with him on all things.
“We don’t agree on everything, but in this case I think that’s good,” said Trump on Tuesday, when discussing Kudlow. “I want to have different opinions. We agree on most. He now has come around to believing in tariffs as a negotiating point.”
We cannot keep a blind eye to the rampant unfair trade practices against our Country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 14, 2018
Kudlow started out in the New York Federal Reserve as a staff economist before joining the Reagan administration in the Office of Management and Budget.
He worked as chief economist for Bear Sterns until 1994, when he was fired in connection with his cocaine addiction, Business Insider said.
Kudlow served as an adviser for the Trump campaign.
He would be replacing Gary Cohn, who resigned last week over disagreements surrounding the tariffs.
Mick Mulvaney, the chief of the OMB, greeted the news of Cohn’s departure by calling his soon-to-be former colleague a “globalist,” a term frequently used in far-right publications as an anti-semitic term.
Trump himself used the term in remarks about Cohn: “He may be a globalist, but I still like him.”
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