


Former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday eviscerated President Donald Trump amid continued turmoil over his fluctuating tariffs policies.
Yellen — a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley — was asked by CNN’s Bianna Golodryga to grade Trump’s handling of the economy.
“I’m afraid I could not give it a passing grade, I’m sorry,” said Yellen in her first televised interview since her years serving under President Joe Biden.
“This is the worst self-inflicted wound that I have ever seen an administration impose on a well-functioning economy.”
Earlier in the program, Golodryga noted that Trump and his officials have been “quite scathing” in their assessment of the Biden administration’s handling of the economy.
She then turned to clips of Trump and his top adviser Stephen Miller raging about inheriting an economy in a “state of calamity and catastrophe.”
Experts broadly described the economy Trump inherited from Biden as being in a good place and predicted that it should fare well barring any policy blunders.
Yellen noted that The Economist, in a report from October 2024, described the U.S. economy as the “envy of the world.”
She added that Trump inherited an economy where growth was “very strong,” unemployment numbers were low, there was an “outstanding record of job creation” and inflation — while not at the Federal Reserve’s 2% target — was “meaningfully” coming down.
“So we had a very well-functioning economy, and President Trump has taken a wrecking ball to it,” Yellen stressed.
On Thursday, the stock market went back to plunging after a day of historic gains following Trump’s 90-day pause on imposing high tariffs toward most countries except China.
She told CNN that Trump’s tariffs on products imported from China, which have reached over 100%, could result in “massive impacts” to both the U.S. and the global economy.
“No one knows where these policies are headed,” she said.