Donald Trump has certainly struck a nerve but the presumptive Republican presidential nominee does not have the right economic prescription for the United States, said Glenn Hutchins, a former advisor to Bill Clinton.
"[Trump's] election will be the equivalent to Brexit in the United States," Hutchins, a wealthy investor and business leader, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday, saying the U.S. needs to avoid at all costs the kind of self-inflicted "chaos and uncertainty" created in the wake of the United Kingdom's vote last week to leave the European Union.
The nationalistic views that led Britons to vote exit are the same type of sentiments that have played out so far in the tumultuous U.S. election cycle, said Hutchins, a supporter of Democrat Hillary Clinton for president.
"This has been the most information-rich election ... since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980," he said, contending the promise of globalization creating prosperity has been soundly rejected in the 2016 presidential nominating contests.
Trump has certainly capitalized on this America-first groundswell. At a rally Tuesday in a former steel town south of Pittsburgh, the billionaire businessman played up familiar themes, blasting free trade agreements and China as U.S. manufacturing job killers.
But on the Democratic side, Clinton hasn't embraced free trade either. A supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in its early stages as secretary of state, Clinton last fall came out against it just days after the U.S. and 11 nations reached a final agreement.
Corporate America needs to do a better job explaining that trade and cooperation among nations are pillars of success in the global economy, said Hutchins, co-founder of technology investment powerhouse Silver Lake Partners and chairman of North Island, the holding company for his personal investments. He also serves on the boards of the New York Federal Reserve, the Economic Club of New York, the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, AT&T and Nasdaq.
"The business community needs to move beyond ideology, needs to move beyond party, needs to move beyond narrowly defined corporate self-interests and understand that we've got to create a foundation of social stability," Hutchins argued. "The only way we're going to get to future trade agreements and tax reform is … to send a message that we care, we hear you and we're creating conditions for rising [wealth] equality."
Hutchins commended Hank Paulson for reaching across the political aisle and endorsing Clinton for president over Trump.
Paulson, who was Treasury secretary during George W. Bush's presidency, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed Friday he's going to vote for Clinton, calling Trump's rise a "populist hijacking" of one of the great political parties of the United States.