Episode Transcript
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I'm Stephen Carol and this is Here's Why, where we take one news story and explain it in just a few minutes with our experts here at Bloomberg.
The higher the tariffs, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States and build a factory in the United States so it doesn't have to pay the terror.
Speaker 2The idea that Donald Trump is opening the world's markets for Americans, the ranchers, the fishermen, are farmers, I mean, these are amazing opportunities that no one in the world has ever seen.
Speaker 3We have a situation where there's kind of a lack of data that's showing tariffs haven't filtered through to inflation.
On top of that, you have a situation where tariffs are still being implemented globally as well as in the US.
Speaker 1Tariffs are going to make us rich as hell.
It's going to break our cut keys businesses back that left us.
Donald Trump promised to put tariffs at the center of his economic policy as US president, and he's delivered with America's most significant protectionist shift in almost a century.
Its whipsad markets upended traditional alliances and push the world's largest economy into uncharted territory.
For Trump, tariffs are a way of tackling what he sees as unfair trade relations while raising government revenue and boosting American manufacturing.
But it's a risky strategy, which economists warren could drive up prices for American consumers and hurt economic growth.
So far, the US President's been able to point to deals with major partners, increased revenue from tariffs, and announcements of big investment by companies in the United States.
Does that outweigh the potential economic and diplomatic damage.
Here's why tariffs may deliver for Trump.
Joining me NAT's discusses Bloomberg's trades are Brandon Murray, Brandon, good to talk to you.
Starting then, with these deals that President Trump has done so far, are they helping to rebalance America's trade relationship with the rest of the world.
Speaker 4Well, the unsatisfying answer is it's too early to tell.
But what Donald Trump has done over the past several months is reorient the world's thinking about tariffs and how the US's place in the global economy sits compared to its trading partners.
What we're looking at is his vision of a universal tariffs, varying to some degrees country by country, but ultimately countries that want to do business with America to sell products to American consumers and businesses are going to have to pay up.
Now, it depends on the deal that you make with the president, but fifteen percent seems like like the baseline, and it goes up from there.
Brazil, which he's lashed out at recently, is going to pay fifty percent if it goes through.
Speaker 1So we've also had this string of announcements then by companies of new investment in the US, like fifty billion dollars recently from AstraZeneca.
Do they represent the major boost to American manufacturing that Donald Trump was looking for?
Speaker 4Well, these are the kinds of commitments that the President's trade strategy is designed to create.
You incentivize companies to produce their products in the US rather than in Switzerland, or in India or various other places.
So the design of this patchwork of tariffs that President Trump is putting in place is to drive production back to the US.
Donald Trump has been a protectionist for several decades, and going back to the nineteen eighties when the big rival in Asia was Japan for cars especially, and he's acting on those instincts today and that he sees the fact that there aren't Ford pickup trucks driving around the streets of Tokyo or Chevrolet Camaros in the streets of Berlin, and he sees that as a fundamental unfairness in the global economy, and he wants those countries to open their goods to US products and to bring the production that has gone overseas in an era of globalization and low tariffs back to the US.
Speaker 1Okay, So that's the goal in terms of boosting manufacturing.
When it comes to the money that the tariffs are bringing in for the US government, how much do we know about what sort of revenue it's raising.
Speaker 4Well, it's raising many billions of dollars a month for the US Treasury, and there are estimates that this could bring in three hundred to four hundred billion dollars.
So over the course of ten years, you know, you're talking a couple trillion dollars.
Depending on how durable those tariffs are are and how high or low they go.
President Trump has said he will raise them or lower them depending on how countries are complying with the deal or not.
So it's unclear how predictable those revenues are going to be.
But they are flowing into the treasury as we speak, and they're going to get even wider and bigger if he follows through on his promises.
Speaker 1But who's paying for those tariffs?
Speaker 4American importers, by law, pay the tariffs they pay him to the Customs Bureau.
And it's often comes out of the White House that this is a country that's paying the tariff that he imposes on them, but that's not accurate.
It is the walmarts, the small businesses that bring their goods over from China or Europe or wherever, who are footing this bill.
And they are very vocal in their complaints about this, and they will either take a hit to their margins, they will try to buy from somewhere else.
Maybe they'll try to buy goods from the US, which is what the Trump administration would hope they would do, or they're going to pass those on to consumers in the form of higher prices at the store.
So there are various ways this could go.
The Trump administration thinks that it will drive production home.
There might be a one time hit to prices, But ultimately the system will resolve itself and kind of and all these wrinkles will be ironed out over the long term, and the net benefit will be that there will be more jobs in the US and more more industrial production at that that comes home from overseas.
Speaker 1Given the changes that we have seen then and these movements we've been discussing since the April second announcement, can we say that Trump is delivering on his goals with these tariffs.
Speaker 4Well, he's delivering press releases, fact sheets, and announcements, but in terms of the economic number, we don't see it yet.
Manufacturing employment over the past two months has gone down by seven thousand each month.
We are seeing some signs in surveys that the Federal Reserve does.
I'll read you a couple of lines from the most recent Dallas Fed survey.
This is a furniture manufacturer who says tariff changes require a sit back and wait attitude.
There is no way to forecast.
Here's a mineral product manufacturer tariffs tariffs, tariffs?
Did I mention tariffs?
And here's a textile product mill.
We are starting to see vendors and suppliers pass on more price increases with tariffs being the explanation.
So those comments are just comments, they're not behavior yet, but you can tell that the pressure from tariffs is affecting businesses in a way that's not good for the overall economy.
Speaker 1So where should we be looking to see the downsides of this?
For the US, the.
Speaker 4First place to look will be business investment.
These are long term, high ticket investments that companies make in either machinery or new facilities to grow their operations, to increase their productivity.
A lot of the uncertainty hovering over the global economy and the US economy especially revolves around what these tariff rates are going to be.
Like, this is a big cost that importers have to pay for.
And if you don't know what those costs are, or you think they might go up or down indiscriminately depending on the mood in the White House, then it's very difficult to make these long term investments.
So investments are sort of the kind of the core driver of longer term economic growth.
And when it comes to what we're seeing an investment now, there seems to be a pullback in company's willingness to spend a lot of money right now.
Until they figure out how this tariff situation was itself.
Speaker 1Christ Donald Trump's promises are made with the US in mind, But what about the rest of the world and all of this.
Speaker 4Well, so far we haven't seen any retaliation.
Is what you would normally see.
If a country puts fifteen percent or higher tariff on your goods, you hit them right back with fifteen percent, and you know, there you have a trade war, and you know, whoever has the highest threshold for pain over the longer term wins.
And what we haven't seen, with if the exception of China, is very little retaliation.
The world seems to be accepting the fact that President Trump is unhappy with these global trade imbalances and is doing something to address them, and they're dealing with it, and they're taking the hit and perhaps hoping that in a couple of years, you know, a new president will come into the US White House and may think differently about how trade should be conducted.
So at the moment, no one's really willing to stand up and go toe to toe with the US, which is what President Trump had assumed all along, that he would be able to throw his weight around and the weight of the US consumer and get the deals that he wants and so far, although the deals don't have a whole lot of substance or follow through in them yet, that's the way it's playing out from their perspective.
Speaker 1Okay, Brandon Murray, Blimberg's trades are Thank you very much.
For more explanations like this from our team of three thousand journalists and analysts around the world, go to bloomberg dot com slash explainers.
I'm Stephen Carroll.
This is here's why.
I'll be back next week with more.
Thanks for listening.