US 'behaving very strangely' for an ally: ECB chief

The United States "is behaving very strangely" for an ally, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said Wednesday, as US President Donald Trump steps up his campaign to take Greenland from NATO ally Denmark.

Trump's bid to seize the Arctic island has opened up the deepest rift between Washington and Europe in decades, with the US leader threatening tariffs on several countries over their opposition to his designs on the Danish territory.

Asked in Davos in an interview with French radio station RTL whether the United States was an "ally" or "adversary" of the EU, Lagarde responded: "They are behaving very strangely for allies."


"When you are allies under the North Atlantic Treaty, when you have been allies for decades and have been part of each other's history, threatening to seize territory that is clearly not for sale, such as Greenland, and waving tariff restrictions, and various other restrictions on international trade, is not really behaving like an ally," she said.

She said she would be paying close attention to the US president's speech later Wednesday at the annual gathering of the world's economic and political elite.

Lagarde, chief of the central bank for the 21 countries that use the euro, said she was not planning to meet Trump in person, but thought his speech would be "interesting".

"Once President Trump has redefined his position this afternoon in Davos, it will allow Europeans to determine what they are going to do together," she said.

"For me, what seems fundamental is unity and determination."

Speaking later at a panel in Davos, Lagarde also warned that further fracturing of the global economy could be bad for business, especially for big players in the artificial intelligence industry.

If you ask the "big spenders" in AI what they need, "they will say access to data as large as possible, they will say scale," she said.

"Now that would be significantly jeopardised if we have limited access to data because of different privacy laws around the world and more protectionist barriers that would prevent the scaling of this investment," she said.