Trump Taps CNBC's Larry Kudlow As Economic Adviser

The White House on Wednesday confirmed media reports that Conservative TV business news personality Larry Kudlow would replace Gary Cohn President Donald Trump's as top economic adviser.

Kudlow, 70, said on live television that he too initially opposed blanket tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which the White House announced last week and which have drawn rebukes from Republican lawmakers and sent global stocks reeling.

Instead, Kudlow told CNBC, where he has long been a commentator and host, that he would have preferred to see a "coalition" of major US trade partners confront China to let the world's second-largest economy know "they are breaking the rules left and right".

Trump had said earlier on Tuesday that he admired Kudlow but that the two did not agree on all points.

Kudlow will replace Cohn as head of the National Economic Council, a policy body created in 1993 that includes senior officials and experts from across an array of policy areas.

Kudlow, a trained economist and a historian, represents a departure from the scholarly types normally chosen for the role as he is better known as a TV pundit, having spent 25 years on CNBC.

His bullish pro-trade ways and comical manner made him a familiar face on the financial news network.

Still, in 2007, just as the US housing bubble was about to burst, he reassured his audience that there would be no recession in the United States.

In the 1980s, he served as White House budget director under President Ronald Reagan and is still a champion of that era's conservative, supply-side economics, which calls for cutting taxes to boost growth -- an ideology the Trump administration has emphatically embraced.

In the private sector, he served as chief economist for the investment bank Bear Stearns from 1987 to 1994.

Two years ago, he supported Trump's presidential campaign, in particular the pledges to renew American infrastructure and cut taxes, becoming an informal Trump adviser in the process.

Married three times, Kudlow has acknowledged undergoing treatment in the 1990s for alcohol and cocaine dependence. He is also a convert to Catholicism. (AFP)