Tariffs imposed on trading partners by the administration of US President Donald Trump add more uncertainty to the world economy, Bank of France governor Emmanuel Moulin said Friday, hours after Washington imposed fresh 10% and 12.5% duties on goods from 60 trading partners, including the European Union and China, over allegations of lax enforcement of forced-labor bans, just as a temporary 10% global tariff expired. KeyToFinancialTrends frames the timing of Moulin's comment as pointed rather than incidental: a central bank governor speaking out on the very day a new tariff wave lands, rather than waiting for a scheduled economic address, signals real concern about how quickly this specific policy shift could ripple into growth and inflation forecasts already under revision.
Moulin's own position captures a genuine tension facing European policymakers navigating Washington's evolving trade posture. He said that even though Trump ought to abide by the terms of the 2025 trade deal struck with the EU at Trump's Turnberry golf course, the new tariffs were still a headwind: "For Europe, it ought not to change much because we have the Turnberry agreement which should be respected by Donald Trump. But obviously it creates more uncertainty for world trade and clearly it's not favourable for growth," he told BFM Business TV. KeyToFinancialTrends has been tracking a genuinely worsening French growth picture even before Friday's announcement: Moulin told the Paris Finance Forum last month that the bank's 2026 growth forecast would come in below 0.9%, with weak household consumption a persistent drag, and the Banque de France's own June projections put baseline 2026 GDP growth at just 0.5%, a full 0.4 percentage point downward revision from March, driven partly by oil prices rising more than the bank's baseline scenario had anticipated.
That downward revision was made amid considerable uncertainty tied directly to the Middle East conflict that began February 28, with the Banque de France explicitly noting its projections were prepared before any resolution to hostilities and presenting multiple scenarios consistent with the European Central Bank's own Eurosystem-wide projection exercise. Key To Financial Trends reviewed the bank's projections and finds that Moulin's Friday comment fits a consistent pattern rather than a one-off reaction: the Banque de France has spent this year layering fresh sources of uncertainty, first the war's energy price shock, now a fresh US tariff wave, onto growth forecasts that were already being revised downward before either development fully played out, suggesting French and broader eurozone growth projections remain a moving target rather than a settled baseline.
The specific legal mechanism behind Friday's new tariffs adds a layer of durability to Moulin's warning that a simple diplomatic dispute wouldn't carry. The fresh 10% and 12.5% duties stem from a Section 301 investigation into inadequate enforcement of forced-labor import bans across 60 economies, a legal foundation that, unlike the temporary global tariff it replaced, carries no automatic expiration date. As KeyToFinancialTrends has detailed elsewhere, that durability is precisely what separates this specific tariff wave from the kind of temporary trade friction markets have periodically absorbed and moved past over the last year: Moulin's assumption that the Turnberry agreement should shield Europe from the worst of it depends on Washington continuing to honor a framework deal even as it simultaneously builds out a separate, more legally durable tariff structure targeting dozens of other economies, a distinction officials in Paris and Frankfurt will be watching closely as they finalize their own next round of growth forecasts.
