Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin criticized the Trump administration’s tariff and tax policies, though he called their deregulation efforts a “godsend.”
Speaking at the May 7 closing session of the Milken Institute Global Conference 2025, Griffin addressed the remarks of U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who opened the conference on May 5. Bessent contended that those three components of the administration’s agenda will collectively lead to economic growth in America.
“I view tariffs as being extraordinarily regressive as a tax policy,” Griffin said. “I actually think they're contrary to the promise that the president made to the American people in terms of improving their standard of living, because it's going to raise the cost of goods for households who can least afford the bill.”
The CEO and founder of hedge fund and trading firm, which managed $63.6 billion at the end of 2024, also said he’s “suspect” that President Donald Trump’s tariffs will bring “a material number of new jobs created in manufacturing,” though the president has often promised to bring such jobs back to America.
On Trump’s tax policies, and what Griffin characterized as “the president’s desire to maintain the current tax status quo and to provide additional tax relief,” he noted that “the president faces a much more difficult hand today than we faced as a country at the start of his first administration.”
Specifically, Griffin cited an increase in the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which currently sits at around 123%, compared to 104% in 2017, according to federal financial data.
Griffin said he’s “worried that we’re not taking a step back and thinking about the fact that, as difficult as the trade deficit is for our country, our nation’s loss of access to global capital would be far more devastating.”
However, on deregulation, “the change in administration has been a godsend,” he said, contending that “the deluge of regulation that was crushing American innovation and creativity stopped in a day.”
In April, Trump signed an executive memorandum calling for federal agency heads to rescind regulations determined to be in conflict with 10 recent Supreme Court decisions. That move followed a similar February executive order in which the president directed agency heads to determine existing rules that should be cut.
