(ANTIMEDIA) Portugal — Highlighting the frustration of many in the business world, a former CEO said at an international conference Monday that U.S. companies no longer know the “rules of the game” under President Donald Trump.
“Right now we don’t know whether we are friendly with Mexico, whether we are friendly with Canada, whether we are friendly with China, whether we are friendly with Russia,” Alan G. Hassenfeld said at the 2017 Horasis conference in Portugal, which was attended by politicians, business leaders, and academics.
Hassenfeld’s family founded the country’s second largest toy company, Hasbro, in the 1920s. Hassenfeld himself was CEO and chairman from 1989 to 2008.
“We thought, you know, if you run a business today you would like to know what the rules of the game are,” Hassenfeld said Monday, adding that under Trump, those rules are “changing constantly.”
The former CEO said a large part of the problem is gridlock in Congress, caused by lawmakers attempting to come to terms with policy reform promises Trump made on the campaign trail:
“Right now, our Congress and in some cases our courts, are caught up in trying to figure out what they are going to do with the executive branch. So right now, we are in that – almost twilight zone – that we are really not sure where things are going.”
And while bringing jobs back to the U.S. was a core element of Trump’s “America First” campaign platform, Hassenfeld says changing modes of manufacturing make that promise a fairly empty one.
“Even if they (the jobs) did come, we’ve all learnt how to automate, we’re all spending money to innovate,” he said.
A recent study published by Cornerstone Capital Group, for example, predicts that 6 to 7.5 million existing jobs will be lost to some form of automation over the next 10 years.
Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo / Image: Gage Skidmore
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