Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Tuesday of potential global economic damage from rising tensions in the Middle East.
Yellen spoke out against Iran’s “malign and destabilizing activity” in remarks ahead of this week’s spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, saying Iran’s weekend missile and drone attack on Israel “underscores the importance of Treasury’s work to use our economic tools to counter Iran’s malign activity.”
She added: “From this weekend’s attack to the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, Iran’s actions threaten the region’s stability and could cause economic spillovers.”
Yellin said the U.S. has targeted over 500 individuals and entities connected to terrorism and terrorist financing by the Iranian regime and its proxies and said she expected additional sanctions to be announced in the coming days.
The annual gathering will take place as other ongoing conflicts, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, threaten global financial stability.
Yellen in February offered her strongest public support yet for the idea of liquidating roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian Central Bank assets and using them for Ukraine’s long-term reconstruction.
She said Tuesday that the U.S. is “continuing to work with our international partners to unlock the economic value of immobilized Russian sovereign assets and ensure that Russia pays for the damage it has caused.” Yellen added that she will meet with Group of Seven finance leaders Wednesday to continue discussions on the topic and will look at “a series of possibilities, ranging from actually seizing the assets to using them as collateral.”
Another major issue for this year’s meetings on the U.S. side, Yellen said, will be ongoing conversations about Chinese industrial policy that poses a threat to U.S. jobs and the global economy. She traveled to Guangzhou and Beijing earlier this month, to hold “difficult conversations” with counterparts over what she describes as China’s overcapacity in its wave of low-priced Chinese green tech exports that could overwhelm factories in the U.S. and make it impossible to compete.
Yellen said she plans to meet later this week with her Chinese counterparts for a fourth meeting of the U.S.-China Economic and Financial Working Groups, “to share information, identify potential areas of cooperation, and, when we disagree, frankly communicate concerns.”
U.S. Treasury and China’s Ministry of Finance launched the economic working groups in an effort to ease tensions and deepen ties between the nations.