U.S.-China trade war to knock 0.5% points off global growth - French minister

Trade tensions between the United States and China are set to knock half a percentage point off of global growth by next year, France's finance minister said in an interview published on Thursday. Bruno Le Maire told French newspaper La Croix that the trade war between the world's biggest two economies was the biggest threat to global growth.

"The tariffs that the United States is putting on Chinese goods and the retaliation from China will have a negative impact of 0.5 percentage points on global growth in 2020," Le Maire said. "That's considerable, especially against the light of the weak growth in the eurozone," he added.

Le Maire said that governments in the shared currency zone should step up efforts to support growth and said that the French government's efforts to reform its economy were bearing fruit. As a result, he added that there was no reason to change the government's growth forecast for this year of 1.4%.

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