WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Top advisers to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic President Joe Biden will hold a series of meetings with top U.S. business leaders on Thursday, offering widely differing views on the economy.
Trump is scheduled to speak at the Business Roundtable at about 11 a.m. local time (15:00 GMT) at the group’s headquarters in Washington, DC, according to two sources familiar with planning for the event. The group, which represents more than 200 CEOs, also plans to host Biden’s White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients, earlier in the day.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will speak at the Economic Club of New York at 12:30 p.m. to discuss “expanding the productive capacity of the U.S. economy,” according to a Treasury Department statement.
It was not immediately clear what message Trump and Zients plan to deliver to the Business Roundtable, whose members include Wall Street heavyweights such as JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman.
Attendees included Bank of America Chief Executive Brian Moynihan and Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Jane Fraser, according to three sources who asked not to be identified discussing the private meeting.
Conservative commentator Larry Kudlow, who served as Trump’s key economic adviser during his 2017-2021 term in office, is scheduled to interview the former president during the event, one of the people said.
Biden and Trump, who are locked in a tight race with five months to go until the Nov. 5 election, do not see eye to eye on several key economic issues.
Biden has made environmental protection a core part of his economic plan. For example, his administration has created a series of incentives for the purchase and use of electric vehicles and in January suspended approvals for liquefied natural gas export applications from new projects.
Without always getting into specifics, Trump has criticized measures to speed up the U.S. economy’s shift away from fossil fuels and has repeatedly said electric cars are useless.
During his presidency, Trump cut the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Biden has proposed raising the top rate for large corporations to 28% — lower than historical rates but higher than current rates.
Business titans return to Trump
Both men have used tariffs extensively to protect U.S. industry, but Trump’s proposals, which include imposing a 10% tariff on all imports, are far more extreme than those of his rivals.
“President Trump’s America First economic policies will deliver middle class tax cuts, record regulatory cuts, fair trade, abundant energy, low inflation, rising wages, and the restoration of the rule of law in America,” said Carolyn Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign.
The White House declined to comment on the content of Mr. Zients’ speech. Mr. Biden is in Italy for the G7 summit and is due to sign a new security pact with Ukraine.
During his visit to Washington, Trump is scheduled to address Republican members of the House and Senate near the US Capitol, meetings that are expected to focus on policy priorities for his second term.
The Business Roundtable regularly invites major party presidential candidates to speak at its events during election years, but Trump’s appearance underscored the warmth some in the business world have shown toward the former president after many companies distanced themselves from him and his supporters following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In the weeks after the raids, a number of major companies announced they would no longer donate to federal politicians who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 vote that Biden won, but many have since quietly appeared to backtrack on those pledges.
Business titans such as Blackstone CEO Schwarzman had previously written off Trump, but have now announced their support for him in the election after he handily beat his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination earlier this year.
(Reporting by Graham Slattery in Washington; Saeed Azar and Tatyana Bautzer in New York; Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Jeff Mason, David Loader and David Morgan in Washington and Nathan Lane in Wilton, Connecticut; Editing by Deepa Babington; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Deepa Babington)
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