Billionaire real-estate mogul Sam Zell advises savvy investors to keep the faith despite some rough sailing in the early weeks of President Donald Trump’s administration.
“I think he's creating a lot of hope,” he recently told Fox Business Network.
“I think that the last eight years has been a period of lack of confidence by the business community in the political leadership of our country and I think the result has been failure to make commitments and failure to take risks, corporate America has more cash today and balance sheet at any time in history,” said Zell, chairman of Equity Group Investments and a member of the Forbes 400,
“How do you make commitments when you don't know what tomorrow is going to be like?” he asked.
He said the key to Trump’s success in part will be slashing most of the burdensome regulation imposed by Barack Obama.
“The regulatory burden has been just unbelievable, I mean, I know we are a small player in the regulation world and cost of compliance has gone up five times in the last four years,” Zell said.
“I think that the biggest opportunity that trump has is to create stimulus by loosening up the regulatory environment which by definition means creating stimulus without creating debt to pay for it,” he said.
Zell's optimism flies in the face of some other economic experts.
A recent survey found that U.S. economic growth is expected to accelerate this year and next, yet remain modest, even if Trump's promised tax cuts and infrastructure spending are implemented, the Associated Press reported.
The economy will grow a solid 2.3 percent this year and 2.5 percent in 2018, according to 50 economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics. Those rates would be up from 2016's anemic pace of 1.6 percent.
Still, those rates are below the 3 percent to 4 percent growth that Trump has promised to bring about through steep corporate and individual tax cuts and more spending on roads, airports and tunnels. Most of the economists surveyed assume that a tax reform package will be approved by Congress this year. About two-fifths expect an infrastructure spending proposal to pass this year, while rest forecast it will happen in 2018 or beyond.
The survey also found that 70 percent of economists think financial markets are too optimistic about the impact of Trump's proposals, should they be enacted. The S&P 500 stock index has risen about 6.5 percent since the presidential election on anticipation of faster growth stemming from Trump's policies. Shares slipped last week as Congress and the Trump administration failed to agree on a health care proposal to replace the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act.
The economists surveyed work for companies, trade associations and in academia. The results were compiled by Timothy Gill, an economist at the American Iron and Steel Institute; Steve Cochrane, an economist at Moody's Analytics; and David Teolis at General Motors, among others.
(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).
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