Latest / Trumponomics / The Tariff Trade-Off
Transcript
- 0:02Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
- 0:17Speaker 2: I'm Stephanie Flanders, head of Government and Economics at Bloomberg,
- 0:21Speaker 2: and this is Trumpnomics, the podcast that looks at everything
- 0:24Speaker 2: in the economic world of Donald Trump. This week, tariffs
- 0:29Speaker 2: are back, and they look like they're here to stay.
- 0:32Speaker 2: We're recording this on Wednesday, the twenty ninth of July.
- 0:35Speaker 2: Late last week, the White House imposed tariffs of around
- 0:39Speaker 2: ten percent on imports from more than eighty countries, replacing
- 0:43Speaker 2: emergency tariffs put in place after the Supreme Court ruled
- 0:46Speaker 2: a lot of the previous ones he'd put in place unconstitutional.
- 0:50Speaker 2: There've also been in the last week new tariffs on
- 0:53Speaker 2: Canada and Brazil, and we have coming down the track,
- 0:56Speaker 2: so called Section three oh one investigations now hanging over
- 1:00Speaker 2: multiple countries, all of which could result in more import
- 1:04Speaker 2: taxes in the next few months. Well, heaven knows. We've
- 1:07Speaker 2: talked about tariffs before on this show. In fact, our
- 1:10Speaker 2: most listened to episode ever was on that topic. But
- 1:14Speaker 2: in a week when the President has reminded us just
- 1:17Speaker 2: how much he likes them, I wanted to step back
- 1:20Speaker 2: and think about the unintended consequences of those tariffs. For
- 1:23Speaker 2: the economy and the federal budget. In a nutshell, many
- 1:27Speaker 2: of the positive consequences from tariffs that the President promised
- 1:31Speaker 2: on the campaign trail have not really happened, or not
- 1:34Speaker 2: in the way he suggested. But you'd have to also
- 1:37Speaker 2: say that the biggest negatives that were talked about before
- 1:39Speaker 2: they were imposed have not really happened either. So raises
- 1:44Speaker 2: the question is President Trump's signature economic policy turning out
- 1:48Speaker 2: to be just a fancy way of extracting a few
- 1:50Speaker 2: more tax revenues from US consumers, And if so, is
- 1:55Speaker 2: anyone really going to want to let that money go? Well,
- 1:58Speaker 2: we've brought back the pair of voices actually who featured
- 2:01Speaker 2: funnily enough in that super popular Trumpenomics episode, Sean donnand
- 2:05Speaker 2: senior writer with Bloomberg who reports on the US and
- 2:08Speaker 2: global economy for US. Sure, thanks so much for joining us.
- 2:12Speaker 3: It's always great to be here.
- 2:14Speaker 2: And trump andomics regular Also in Washington, Ana Wong, chief
- 2:17Speaker 2: US economist at Bloomberg Economics, who's previously worked at the
- 2:21Speaker 2: Federal Reserve and served in the Trump White House in
- 2:23Speaker 2: twenty nineteen and twenty twenty on to comment at the
- 2:26Speaker 2: Council of Economic advisors. Anna always great to get you on.
- 2:30Speaker 2: Happy to be here, Sean. There was a lot of
- 2:39Speaker 2: talk ahead of these tariffs, and indeed President Trump used
- 2:42Speaker 2: to talk a lot about it in his first term,
- 2:44Speaker 2: that they were going to bring manufacturing back to the US.
- 2:48Speaker 2: We were going to see reshoring and a revitalization of
- 2:53Speaker 2: US manufacturing. We were going to see the trade deficit
- 2:56Speaker 2: four and some extra revenue for the federal government which
- 3:00Speaker 2: was going to be paid for by all those foreign exporters.
- 3:03Speaker 2: You had a great story this week focusing on tin cans,
- 3:07Speaker 2: no less, and I thought that really painted a picture
- 3:11Speaker 2: of how that manufacturing piece had sometimes panned out on
- 3:17Speaker 2: the ground. So tell us a little bit about that.
- 3:19Speaker 3: The reason I looked at tin cans was because it's
- 3:23Speaker 3: a way of looking at Trump's original tariffs, which were
- 3:27Speaker 3: the steel tariffs that he imposed back in March of
- 3:30Speaker 3: twenty eighteen and twenty five percent tariff on all imports
- 3:33Speaker 3: of steeling. On the day after the announcement went out,
- 3:38Speaker 3: as markets were having conneptions, Wilbur Ross went on television
- 3:43Speaker 3: and who was then the Commerce secretary, right, and he
- 3:48Speaker 3: held up a can of Campbell's soup and said, essentially
- 3:54Speaker 3: the tariffs will not affect the cost of this one bit.
- 3:59Speaker 3: He had calculated how much steel was in there. He
- 4:01Speaker 3: also said that the payoff for these tariffs would be
- 4:05Speaker 3: tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of
- 4:09Speaker 3: dollars of investment. So I thought, let's take this tin
- 4:14Speaker 3: can and look at it as a case study of
- 4:16Speaker 3: how things have actually worked out. Well. The answer is,
- 4:19Speaker 3: the price of that tin can has gone up substantially
- 4:23Speaker 3: since March of twenty eighteen, when these tariffs were put
- 4:26Speaker 3: in place. The cost of canned fruits and vegetables that
- 4:30Speaker 3: consumers pay are up almost fifty percent since that day,
- 4:34Speaker 3: and the cost of the empty can itself coming off
- 4:38Speaker 3: the production line is up eighty percent since March of
- 4:42Speaker 3: twenty eighteen. So there's a significant impact on the cost side.
- 4:47Speaker 3: One of the reasons for that is that, in fact,
- 4:51Speaker 3: one of these promises of the tariffs, which was that
- 4:53Speaker 3: there would be more investment in domestic production domestic capacity,
- 4:58Speaker 3: hasn't played out at all. On that day that Will
- 5:01Speaker 3: Barross went on TV, there were a dozen steel mills
- 5:04Speaker 3: in the US that turned out tin plate can makers
- 5:07Speaker 3: imported about fifty percent of the steel that they used
- 5:11Speaker 3: to make cans, and that was supposed to go down well.
- 5:16Speaker 3: In fact, there are now only three steel mills in
- 5:19Speaker 3: the United States that make tin plate, and can makers
- 5:23Speaker 3: import eighty percent of the steel that they need to
- 5:27Speaker 3: make those tin cans. At the same time, we haven't
- 5:30Speaker 3: seen the jobs story work out in the same way.
- 5:34Speaker 3: There are now roughly thirteen hundred more people working in
- 5:38Speaker 3: American steel mills than there were in March of twenty eighteen,
- 5:42Speaker 3: so it hasn't been a huge jobs boom even for
- 5:45Speaker 3: the broader steel industry, although we have seen investment in
- 5:48Speaker 3: other parts. And part of the story here is also
- 5:51Speaker 3: about how tariffs don't happen in isolation. They happen in
- 5:56Speaker 3: an economy that has lots of different things going on.
- 6:00Speaker 3: The reality for the US steel industry is that making
- 6:03Speaker 3: tinplate is difficult, it's capital intensive, and it's a tiny
- 6:08Speaker 3: part of the US steel market. And therefore, the real
- 6:11Speaker 3: question that you hear, and that I heard from economists
- 6:14Speaker 3: and people in the industries, why are we putting tariffs
- 6:18Speaker 3: on imports of something that the domestic industry does not
- 6:22Speaker 3: want to make and does not want to invest in
- 6:26Speaker 3: an allocate capital too, And so that to me, is
- 6:30Speaker 3: a case study for a lot of these tariffs. You
- 6:32Speaker 3: can go down through the supply chain, and I talked to.
- 6:34Speaker 3: One of the people I talked to was a tomato
- 6:36Speaker 3: farmer in Indiana who's planting fewer tomatoes this summer as
- 6:41Speaker 3: a result of the higher cost of cans and as
- 6:45Speaker 3: a result also of international competition, because these tariffs don't
- 6:48Speaker 3: apply to cans that are already filled with fruits and
- 6:51Speaker 3: vegetables that are being imported, and so the domestic competitiveness
- 6:55Speaker 3: has been hit by this as well. And so that's
- 6:59Speaker 3: the unintended content with this, and then there's this kind
- 7:01Speaker 3: of unfulfilled promises thing. And I think that that as
- 7:04Speaker 3: really when we think of the kind of political economy
- 7:07Speaker 3: of these tariffs. As the big issue that Trump faces
- 7:13Speaker 3: if you go back to twenty sixteen, you go back
- 7:15Speaker 3: to when he was first running for president and he
- 7:18Speaker 3: was first talking about cracking down on trade and first
- 7:20Speaker 3: talking about tariffs in all of those campaigns, is that
- 7:24Speaker 3: he is promising more factory jobs in the United States,
- 7:28Speaker 3: and today there are seventy five thousand fewer people working
- 7:31Speaker 3: in American factories than there were when Trump returned to
- 7:34Speaker 3: office in January of twenty twenty five.
- 7:36Speaker 2: And it's interesting, Sean. I think it makes sense to
- 7:39Speaker 2: be focusing on some of the sectors that were affected
- 7:41Speaker 2: by the first Trump tariffs, because obviously you could make
- 7:45Speaker 2: the argument, and has been made on this program before,
- 7:48Speaker 2: that it's quite soon if you want to have the
- 7:51Speaker 2: kind of shift that Donald Trump is talking about. But
- 7:54Speaker 2: I guess what's interesting from the way you've talked to,
- 7:57Speaker 2: particularly with a question of whether or not you could
- 7:59Speaker 2: have more US producers of tinplate to replace those imported
- 8:05Speaker 2: tin plate for the ten cans seen from the people
- 8:08Speaker 2: you talk to that this wasn't just a matter of
- 8:10Speaker 2: time and the tariffs being in long enough. They already
- 8:13Speaker 2: had quite a lot of protection. They were looking to
- 8:15Speaker 2: have even more, and it just didn't seem like it
- 8:18Speaker 2: was going to work.
- 8:20Speaker 3: I think in the Trump presidency it is such a
- 8:23Speaker 3: short news cycle that we deal with on every day.
- 8:26Speaker 3: There's a lot of noise on every day. But we
- 8:28Speaker 3: are now a decade into this experiment, and at least
- 8:32Speaker 3: eight years into tariff's actually being in place, we can
- 8:37Speaker 3: actually look at what has happened in some of these cases.
- 8:41Speaker 3: This is no longer a promise about what's coming in
- 8:42Speaker 3: the future.
- 8:43Speaker 2: There is a record now, So Anna, one of the
- 8:46Speaker 2: reasons I wanted to have you on is I know
- 8:48Speaker 2: you have a slightly different view of this, just on
- 8:51Speaker 2: this piece of whether or not US domestic manufacturing has
- 8:56Speaker 2: been affected in the way that Donald Trump talked about
- 9:02Speaker 2: manufacturing jobs coming back to the US as support for
- 9:06Speaker 2: domestic production, a reduction in the trade deficit. What's happened
- 9:10Speaker 2: with those What kind of evidence are you looking at?
- 9:13Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, Stephanie, As I was listening to Sean
- 9:16Speaker 4: as he was talking about how Trump promises loads of
- 9:19Speaker 4: manufacturing jobs, it bade me recall the time when I
- 9:24Speaker 4: was conded to the Council of Economic Advisors and I
- 9:27Speaker 4: was writing talking points for these senior leaders. And it
- 9:32Speaker 4: is indeed true that politicians are very much indexed to
- 9:37Speaker 4: the number of jobs. When they go out to give speeches,
- 9:39Speaker 4: they want to talk about how many jobs is created.
- 9:42Speaker 4: But as an economist who's evaluating the overall impact of
- 9:47Speaker 4: a certain policy, we care about all these other variables,
- 9:52Speaker 4: including profits, investment, and because jobs comes way later. Only
- 9:58Speaker 4: after profits and vestment productivity happen. Would you have jobs?
- 10:03Speaker 4: So when we evaluate the success or failure of a policy.
- 10:06Speaker 4: You want to look at everything to play the devil's advocate.
- 10:09Speaker 4: What I'm seeing in the manufacturing sector is put aside
- 10:15Speaker 4: for a second, what is causing this? But the facts
- 10:18Speaker 4: are that I think manufacturing has improved over the last years,
- 10:24Speaker 4: and the improvement, while it did not result in a
- 10:27Speaker 4: surge in jobs, it has basically concentrated a significant increase
- 10:32Speaker 4: in output as well as productivity. So when you have
- 10:35Speaker 4: output increased but no hiring increase, that means higher labor productivity.
- 10:42Speaker 4: So from an economist point of view, not a politician's
- 10:46Speaker 4: point of view, increased productivity is a good thing. And
- 10:51Speaker 4: so for whatever reason the manufacturing sector has improved in
- 10:55Speaker 4: the last year. Now it's just due to tariffs, as
- 10:59Speaker 4: Sean's tin care example showed, and also just looking at
- 11:04Speaker 4: what sectors are most exposed to tariffs, we see that
- 11:07Speaker 4: it is in these China exposed sectors like apparels, textiles,
- 11:12Speaker 4: consumer electronics and stuff like that. No, the increased in
- 11:17Speaker 4: manufacturing output are not in these sectors. The increased in
- 11:22Speaker 4: manufacturing productivity and output are concentrated in durable manufacturing sectors
- 11:28Speaker 4: such as computers electronics, not the consumer type, but hardware,
- 11:33Speaker 4: high value added stuff, aerospace mining. Also, would I say
- 11:39Speaker 4: that this resurgence in manufacturing is due to tariff No,
- 11:44Speaker 4: I do not see direct evidence of that. However, there
- 11:48Speaker 4: is an improvement in the manufacturing sector for whatever it
- 11:52Speaker 4: is happening.
- 11:53Speaker 2: And I seem to recall Anna some interesting conversations that
- 11:57Speaker 2: we have had where you were speculating that the tariffs,
- 12:01Speaker 2: you know, for many companies would have just been presented
- 12:04Speaker 2: that have felt like a cost increase of one form
- 12:06Speaker 2: or another, and maybe something they had to decide whether
- 12:10Speaker 2: or not to pass on to consumers, and had been
- 12:13Speaker 2: a spur to get more out of workers and to
- 12:18Speaker 2: have maybe had that kind of indirect impact on productivity
- 12:21Speaker 2: that you've just described.
- 12:23Speaker 4: Yeah, so when you look at the output manufacturing output,
- 12:27Speaker 4: you see that the increase is driven by more hours
- 12:30Speaker 4: out of existing workers. So part of that is that
- 12:33Speaker 4: my team also looked at earning transcripts in the last
- 12:37Speaker 4: couple of quarters and the way that firms are describing
- 12:41Speaker 4: how they handle the increased input costs from tariffs. First
- 12:45Speaker 4: of all, it's absolutely true that tariffs are raising the
- 12:50Speaker 4: input costs of firms. The question is how are firms
- 12:54Speaker 4: dealing with that, and so in Sean's tin can case,
- 12:59Speaker 4: Campbell's soup decided to surgically raise the price of these
- 13:03Speaker 4: soup tincns, right, but they are also cutting prices in
- 13:08Speaker 4: some of the other stuff. Because what happened is when
- 13:11Speaker 4: they've raised the price on these products where which is
- 13:15Speaker 4: catered to lower income people who are very budget conscious,
- 13:19Speaker 4: the sales fall and declined and they had to make
- 13:22Speaker 4: up for that revenue with something else, but cutting prices
- 13:26Speaker 4: and something else. And so that's generally one way of
- 13:29Speaker 4: dealing with how do you handle higher input cause second
- 13:32Speaker 4: is that they are not simply hiring less people and
- 13:36Speaker 4: extracted more out of existing workers. And third, they are
- 13:40Speaker 4: rejiggering the supply chain. And we see in the earning
- 13:44Speaker 4: calls a lot of firms talk about how they have
- 13:47Speaker 4: already put in place different you know, set up on
- 13:51Speaker 4: supply chains. In fact, I would say many more than
- 13:55Speaker 4: half of that that rejiggering has already happened. Those are
- 13:59Speaker 4: all ways to how to increase operational efficiency to deal
- 14:03Speaker 4: with input costs, and it makes a.
- 14:05Speaker 3: Very good point about productivity, increased efficiency and the kind
- 14:08Speaker 3: of as an unintended byproduct of tariffs or one of
- 14:11Speaker 3: the really fascinating things I discovered when I visited Robert
- 14:15Speaker 3: Gatz and the Can Corporation of America is that one
- 14:18Speaker 3: of the ways they responded to the original steel traff
- 14:21Speaker 3: was by making thinner cans. They now make more cans
- 14:26Speaker 3: using roughly the same amount of steel as they did
- 14:30Speaker 3: eight years ago, because they have figured out a way
- 14:33Speaker 3: to make those cans thinner. Now you know, they insist
- 14:37Speaker 3: they're not flimsier.
- 14:38Speaker 2: But the result in us opening our cupboards in a
- 14:41Speaker 2: few years time in discovering, oh, yes, those are the
- 14:43Speaker 2: post twenty twenty five cans, but there's no evidence of
- 14:47Speaker 2: that so far. I listened to you, Sean, and I
- 14:49Speaker 2: do worry a bit that your family are now also
- 14:51Speaker 2: very well informed about in cans. You have invested a
- 14:56Speaker 2: very an impressive amount of time and actually what turns
- 14:59Speaker 2: out to be a rather interesting industry.
- 15:02Speaker 3: Yeah, I my children are regularly bored at the turntable.
- 15:17Speaker 2: But we haven't mentioned the big other positive that the
- 15:20Speaker 2: administration did talk about going into this, particularly the Treasury Sectuary,
- 15:24Speaker 2: that it would bring great increase in revenues for the
- 15:30Speaker 2: federal government, and there was even talk of a tariff
- 15:33Speaker 2: dividend for voters courtesy of Donald Trump and what's happened there?
- 15:38Speaker 4: Yeah, so here heroes done numbers. So last year, the
- 15:42Speaker 4: tariff revenues was roughly around two hundred billion, depending on
- 15:47Speaker 4: whether you look at calendar year fiscal year, but I
- 15:49Speaker 4: would say around the two hundred billion mark. Before the
- 15:53Speaker 4: liberation day it was around eighty billion. And now after
- 15:58Speaker 4: the AIBA ruling, so far the administration had to refund
- 16:03Speaker 4: eighty billion of those roughly two hundred billion collective.
- 16:07Speaker 2: That's interesting. They have done they have done the refuc.
- 16:10Speaker 4: Yeah, they definitely have done the refund. We have a
- 16:13Speaker 4: lot of evidence around there that so eighty billion is
- 16:16Speaker 4: the ones that's already refunded. The total possible amount that's
- 16:22Speaker 4: needed to be refunded is around one hundred and sixty
- 16:25Speaker 4: six billion because out of the collected, one hundred and
- 16:29Speaker 4: sixty six billion was due to AEPA. I think what
- 16:33Speaker 4: that shows is that the terraff last year indeed was
- 16:37Speaker 4: quite an important source of fiscal revenues. When you look
- 16:41Speaker 4: at the ten year budget period for CBO that is
- 16:46Speaker 4: a post the terraff revenues based on AEPA and all
- 16:49Speaker 4: the other terror policies was supposed to generate roughly three
- 16:53Speaker 4: point three trillion in revenues over ten years, and that's
- 16:56Speaker 4: roughly how much the One Big Beautiful Bill cost. So
- 17:00Speaker 4: now that we have the ABA ruling, and even taking
- 17:05Speaker 4: into account the interim policies to fill the gap, such
- 17:10Speaker 4: as using the one twenty two and last week the
- 17:14Speaker 4: three oh one and three three eight, I think what
- 17:17Speaker 4: we are looking at is a reduced FRISCO revenue estimate
- 17:21Speaker 4: of roughly more like around two trillion as opposed to
- 17:25Speaker 4: three trillion over ten years, and the yearly this year
- 17:30Speaker 4: as opposed to three hundred billion, it's looking more likely
- 17:34Speaker 4: to be two hundred billion. So when we enter this year,
- 17:39Speaker 4: CBO has estimated the fiscal deficit should be would be
- 17:43Speaker 4: around five point eight percent of GDP. This year it's
- 17:46Speaker 4: one point nine trillion physical deficit. Now it's looking more
- 17:50Speaker 4: likely to be six percent of GDP. For all these reasons,
- 17:55Speaker 4: there are other reasons, including higher treasury rates. You know
- 18:00Speaker 4: CBO expected average ten year treasury yields to be four
- 18:05Speaker 4: point one this year, Well it's averaged four point five percent,
- 18:10Speaker 4: and I think part of that is I think Wall
- 18:12Speaker 4: Street do look at these tariff revenues numbers, I mean
- 18:16Speaker 4: fixed income traders, and if it's looking like there's more
- 18:20Speaker 4: uncertainty around the collection of these revenues, I think people
- 18:24Speaker 4: will get more bearish in the treasury rates market.
- 18:28Speaker 3: Can I just make two quick points on the income
- 18:31Speaker 3: the kind of fiscal effect side of things. One is
- 18:35Speaker 3: the refunds they're not done with. In fact, in June
- 18:39Speaker 3: there was a net outflow of from the Treasury when
- 18:44Speaker 3: it came to customs duties. The number listed on the
- 18:47Speaker 3: monthly Treasury report was minus twenty five point five billion dollars,
- 18:52Speaker 3: and we're likely to see several more months like that
- 18:55Speaker 3: this year because, as Anna says, they've refunded about eighty
- 18:58Speaker 3: billion dollars, there's another eighty billion dollars that they need
- 19:02Speaker 3: to refund because the courts are really holding their feet
- 19:05Speaker 3: to the fire on this. There's that short term fiscal piece.
- 19:10Speaker 3: Is a lot of that two hundred billion dollars that
- 19:12Speaker 3: they raised last year that they're sending back to people
- 19:14Speaker 3: this year. The second point is that the kind of
- 19:17Speaker 3: durability of tariffs, and I think that's something we need
- 19:19Speaker 3: to think more. The Yell budget lab estimates it's one
- 19:22Speaker 3: point nine trillion dollars over the next ten years based
- 19:25Speaker 3: on the current state of tariffs that you would get
- 19:28Speaker 3: in revenues. But they make the point also that that
- 19:30Speaker 3: does not account for slower growth that you get as
- 19:34Speaker 3: a result of tariffs. The other point is that there
- 19:38Speaker 3: are more legal challenges coming The tariffs that were announced
- 19:42Speaker 3: last week were very quickly challenged by another group of
- 19:44Speaker 3: small businesses. There's a guy called Alan Wolf who's one
- 19:47Speaker 3: of the kind of eminos degrees of the trade bar
- 19:51Speaker 3: here in Washington, actually helped write the nineteen seventy four
- 19:54Speaker 3: trade law, who says that the use of that law,
- 19:58Speaker 3: in the section three oh one of that law that
- 20:00Speaker 3: the Trump administration rolled out last week is completely against
- 20:04Speaker 3: the spirit of the law and likely open to legal challenge.
- 20:09Speaker 3: There are going to be more legal challenges coming up,
- 20:11Speaker 3: so the question is, okay, are these going to withstand
- 20:14Speaker 3: further court challenges? And I've heard this from Scott Besson
- 20:17Speaker 3: himself making the point that well, if the tariffs really work,
- 20:22Speaker 3: we should see diminishing revenues from them over time, because
- 20:27Speaker 3: if you are real, if you are reshoring manufacturing, then
- 20:31Speaker 3: you're going to get less tariff revenue and you're going
- 20:35Speaker 3: to get more business tax revenues, and is the kind
- 20:38Speaker 3: of is the hope. So the idea of tariffs as
- 20:42Speaker 3: this kind of fiscal wonder tool going into the future,
- 20:47Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of caveats on.
- 20:49Speaker 2: You know, we focused a lot on whether or not
- 20:51Speaker 2: the good stuff that was promised has happened, and we
- 20:54Speaker 2: had a debay to bend the manufacturing. It seems very
- 20:57Speaker 2: unclear that the tariffs have really engineered a revival by
- 21:01Speaker 2: themselves of domestic manufacturing. Maybe that's an unreasonable expectation. There
- 21:07Speaker 2: was a big surprise in that other countries didn't retaliate
- 21:10Speaker 2: to the tariffs the US imposed tariffs, and that has
- 21:13Speaker 2: fundamentally changed, certainly the impact on the global economy. And
- 21:18Speaker 2: we haven't seen tariffs meaningfully increase US inflation, even though
- 21:23Speaker 2: a lot of consumers sort of link them tariffs to
- 21:26Speaker 2: the high costs in their minds. So I guess it's
- 21:29Speaker 2: fair to say, Anna, although we haven't seen all the
- 21:31Speaker 2: positive consequences, some of the things that the critics focused
- 21:35Speaker 2: most on before President Trump's Liberation Day have not really
- 21:40Speaker 2: panned out either. One thing that I guess was predictable
- 21:44Speaker 2: but is very evident is these are super unpopular, these tariffs,
- 21:49Speaker 2: and people do associate the tariffs with higher costs, even
- 21:54Speaker 2: if the numbers don't quite back it up.
- 21:57Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely, but everything is unpopular. Cutting back fiscal deficits
- 22:01Speaker 4: also unpopular. Doge was unpopular. The question is, I mean,
- 22:07Speaker 4: once the government start spending or people start spending, it's
- 22:10Speaker 4: hard to cut back. It's always feels terrible to downgrade.
- 22:15Speaker 4: So the question is which one is relatively easier or
- 22:19Speaker 4: less painful. And it's clear that the Trump administration has
- 22:23Speaker 4: decided that forcing, you know, tariffs, using tariff policy is
- 22:29Speaker 4: the relatively less painful route too, you know, solve a
- 22:34Speaker 4: couple problems at the same time.
- 22:36Speaker 2: And certainly raise a few hundred billion dollars. I mean, Sean,
- 22:40Speaker 2: I take your point about the uncertainty, but as things stand,
- 22:44Speaker 2: you have an increase in taxes that certainly many Democrats
- 22:50Speaker 2: didn't think was possible, an increase in Texas that was
- 22:52Speaker 2: very much focused on consumers. It seems like so even
- 22:56Speaker 2: if they're very against them, seems quite unlikely they get
- 23:00Speaker 2: the rush to remove them.
- 23:01Speaker 3: Let's wait and see. But right now, in these midterm elections,
- 23:05Speaker 3: Democrats are pointing to tariffs as a vulnerability for the president.
- 23:10Speaker 3: They think they can make political hay with it. But
- 23:15Speaker 3: I think it fits with a broader a broader sentiment,
- 23:20Speaker 3: and that is that the economic policies that President Trump
- 23:26Speaker 3: has rolled out in the past eighteen months have not
- 23:30Speaker 3: delivered what he promised. And I think that is whether
- 23:35Speaker 3: it's terrace, when it's immigration policy, whether it's the broader
- 23:39Speaker 3: issue of bringing down prices. The feeling is that President
- 23:45Speaker 3: Trump has injected and this comes up in poll after
- 23:49Speaker 3: poll after poll in which he rates very low on
- 23:52Speaker 3: the economy, his management of the economy. But the feeling
- 23:55Speaker 3: is that President Trump has injected new love of chaos
- 24:01Speaker 3: into the US economy and that voters are feeling the
- 24:06Speaker 3: effects of that in multiple ways, or at least associating
- 24:11Speaker 3: what they're feeling with that. And that is the kind
- 24:16Speaker 3: of big political question. And the longer term political question
- 24:19Speaker 3: around tariffs is how politically unpopular they will prove to
- 24:26Speaker 3: be years from now. I mean that the history of
- 24:29Speaker 3: the United States before World War Two, and the history
- 24:34Speaker 3: of economic policy debates in the US was often around tariffs,
- 24:39Speaker 3: and it was this fight between consumers and producers over
- 24:43Speaker 3: tariffs and protectionism, and you had this go in political
- 24:46Speaker 3: cycles where they were popular and a government would be
- 24:50Speaker 3: elected and introduced tariffs, and then they were unpopular as
- 24:53Speaker 3: soon as consumers started to pay for them, and that
- 24:55Speaker 3: government would be voted out. And you know, maybe we
- 24:58Speaker 3: will see that cycle return.
- 25:00Speaker 2: Well, there are lots of things that are unique about
- 25:02Speaker 2: Donald Trump. I think the idea that the voter's perception
- 25:05Speaker 2: that he has not delivered on his promises is not
- 25:08Speaker 2: unique to him as a politician. I'm afraid it's something
- 25:11Speaker 2: that we're seeing quite a lot of. But I'm sure
- 25:13Speaker 2: you're right, Sean, that the Democrats have feel they have
- 25:17Speaker 2: a strong stick to beat the administration within the form
- 25:21Speaker 2: of tariff. So I just hope that you and all
- 25:23Speaker 2: these other reporters we have in DC will also be
- 25:25Speaker 2: asking those Democrats what they would do instead. Thank you
- 25:29Speaker 2: very much, Sean Donn and Anna Wong. A discussion to
- 25:33Speaker 2: be continued, no doubt, but thanks for joining.
- 25:36Speaker 1: This week, Thanks for having us, Thank you, thanks.
- 25:48Speaker 2: For listening to trump Andomics from Bloomberg. It was hosted
- 25:50Speaker 2: by me Stephanie Flanders. I was joined by Anna Wong
- 25:53Speaker 2: and Sean Donald Trump Andnomics is produced by Moses and
- 25:56Speaker 2: Am and Samasadi with help from Amy Keen and this
- 26:00Speaker 2: Rachel Nvis Christie. Sound design was by Blake Maples and
- 26:04Speaker 2: Kelly Garry