Fedex President and CEO Fred Smith told CNBC Monday that US corporate tax rates need to be reduced in order to promote job growth.
“We have among the highest corporate tax rates in the world. We punish capital investment, and we simply have to turn that around if we want to produce the kind of jobs that everyone is looking for,” said Smith.
Smith founded Fedex in 1971 and has been president and CEO since 1998.
“The one thing that is almost 100 percent correlated with job creation is private business investment, and private business investment is running about 15 percent lower now than it was two years ago.”
Smith said Fedex continues to see brisk growth in its emerging market sector, but US growth pales in comparison: He predicted that the US economy will grow at 2.5 or 2.6 percent of GDP this year, with industrial production at 4.4 percent.
“The fastest growing economy in the world is not any one country but the economy of global trade, which is now about 26 percent of all GDP in aggregate,” he added.
“The emerging markets now are about 50 percent of that trade, trading more with one another than with the industrialized economies.”