Billionaire investor George Soros on Thursday likened Donald Trump to a would-be dictator and predicted that global economies would stumble after the president-elect is inaugurated.
Trump “would be a dictator if he could get away with it.” Soros said at a World Economic Forum event hosted by Bloomberg News in Davos, Switzerland.
Soros said Trump is headed for failure.
“I personally am convinced that he is going to fail. Not because of people like me who would like him to fail. But because his ideas that guide him are inherently self-contradictory and the contradictions are actually already embodied by his advisers ... and his Cabinet,” Soros said, according to Reuters.
Trump’s comments and actions as president-elect have broken with some of the United States’ core foreign policy tenets. He has rattled European allies by saying NATO is obsolete, widened a rift with China by questioning a policy acknowledging its authority over Taiwan and taken a rather lax attitude toward U.S. intelligence reports of Russian hacking in the presidential election.
He’s also vowed to impose heavy tariffs on imports, abandon trade deals and renege on the Paris Agreement on climate action.
With such abrupt changes coming from the White House, Soros said, China is poised to see its international reputation climb.
U.S. stock markets have rallied since Election Day, but Soros predicted they’ll cool off when “reality” sets in.
“Uncertainty is at a peak and actually uncertainty is the enemy of long-term investment,” Soros said. “I don’t think the markets are going to do very well. Right now they’re still celebrating but when reality comes it will prevail.”
He’s recently been off the mark, though. The Wall Street Journal reported that Soros lost almost $1 billion through mid-January at a time when the Dow Jones Industrial Average grew by 9 percent after Trump’s campaign win.
Soros also made explosive comments about Trump at last year’s event in Davos, while Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination. Because of Trump’s calls to ban Muslims from entering the country, Soros said that “Donald Trump is doing the work of ISIS.”