Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / From Tariffs to Technology: Preparing Your Business for Volatile Global Markets
Transcript
- 0:00Foreign.
- 0:07Dave Goulas back again Beyond Fulfillment podcast with my good friend Jim Tompkins.
- 0:12Welcome, Jim.
- 0:13Good morning, Dave.
- 0:14Yeah, good morning.
- 0:16Glad to see you again.
- 0:18It's been good to be seen, I tell you.
- 0:20We've been all over Europe and halfway around the world and I'm leaving for Panama in two days.
- 0:25And so, yeah, crazy times.
- 0:28Yeah, absolutely.
- 0:29And it's been several weeks since we did an episode about trade and tariffs, so we thought this is a great time to jump back into it.
- 0:37And so let's just get started.
- 0:40So, Jim, after the shockwaves with July and August and what's been happening over the last two weeks, where are we right now with trade and tariffs?
- 0:50Well, you know, we thought it'd be an interesting quiet time, but the fact of the matter is there's been some really good news and some really bad news and then some things that is kind of no news.
- 1:02And so it's been an interesting time the last couple weeks.
- 1:06Good news, Canada has become much more aligned with the US and they are dropping all retaliatory tariffs and they're going to match the US Exemptions under the usmca.
- 1:21And so we're signaling a movement in the North America coming together again.
- 1:28Mexico hasn't made much movement yet, but there is interesting discussions going on.
- 1:34So good news for Canada and maybe good news for North America.
- 1:40Second, good news, the European framework has been finalized.
- 1:44The 15% blanket tariffs across the board are now in place, including automotive, which is something that I thought was an interesting concession that the US Made.
- 1:57And the US and the EU is dropping all the duties on US Industrial goods and seafood.
- 2:05US Is granted the preference to get into the European markets.
- 2:13And the EU commitment for 600 billion between now and 2028 is in place.
- 2:20And so it's right now as we sit, the tariffs average 15.8% around the world and that compares to 2.3%, which is at the end of 2024.
- 2:35So Trump's administration has delivered on not only raising the investments, but also raising the tariffs to the point where we can be moving forward with thinking about balancing up our trade and also our budget eventually.
- 2:53So all good there.
- 2:56On a bad news point of view, India, who's been trying to maintain its position of non alignment and they want to play games with everyone, they want to be everyone's friend, has now got themselves in the Trump crosshairs.
- 3:14Trump has raised their tariffs to 50%.
- 3:18This after three months ago.
- 3:19We thought we had a deal with India, but we didn't.
- 3:23And the the Big deal there is India continues to buy substantial amounts of oil from Russia.
- 3:31And that, of course, is allowing the Russian economy to have the money which allows them to continue the Ukrainian war.
- 3:38And so that's kind of a no go from a US Point of View.
- 3:44And so bad news in India, no clear resolution there as we sit.
- 3:53Also a little bit of bad news is that furniture which was exempt from tariffs previously has now come under the watching eye of Washington, D.C.
- 4:07and it looks like there's going to be some tariffs coming there which could be problematic.
- 4:14In the no news category is Brazil and China, where the tariffs are now standing at a level which is unacceptable to Brazil and therefore that is resulted in a kind of a diplomatic breakdown.
- 4:38There's no communications at all going on with Brazil, no activity with China.
- 4:43And I say that's bad news because that's just continued postponement.
- 4:47And I think what's going to now happen with China is we're going to wind up with further delays.
- 4:54I don't think we're going to get a new tariff in place by November 9th, and I can talk about that a little bit more later.
- 5:00But I believe where we're going to see China is into 2026 before that issue gets resolved.
- 5:10And so I think that's bad news.
- 5:13If we could get China straight now, that would make the whole thing come together better.
- 5:20But I don't think China wants to do that.
- 5:22I think China likes the position of delaying it and seeing how the other cards fall.
- 5:27So some real mixed bag taking place over the last couple weeks.
- 5:33Some surprises, some good and some not so good.
- 5:37Okay, and with all that happening, where do you see things heading over the next two weeks?
- 5:43Well, a big topic that we're going to see a lot of news about, but I don't think it's very newsworthy, is the courts are going to rule on the legitimacy of the tariffs.
- 5:55To be perfectly honest, from my point of view, that doesn't matter.
- 5:59If the courts find that the tariffs are illegal, there is already legal precedent that that will go to Supreme Court.
- 6:07And I believe that would overturn the appeals court.
- 6:10And therefore the tariffs are going to be legal.
- 6:12If the tariffs are not legal at the Supreme Court, then there's other avenues, at least three other avenues that Trump can use to make the tariffs legal again.
- 6:23And so it's just a political news thing.
- 6:27I don't think it's going to have any impacts on the tariffs.
- 6:31Something else that's getting kicked off following on the furniture, which we saw in the last two weeks.
- 6:38I think in the next two weeks we're going to see pharma and electronics, excuse me, getting under the microscope and we're going to find out there is going to be some tariff expanding in pharma and electronics which could
- 6:53go around the world.
- 6:54And so I think that could happen in early September.
- 6:59And then there's a big thing happening in our world is that the supply chains are being recalibrated.
- 7:07There's enough of the world that now has deals that are being put in place.
- 7:13And so we're going to start seeing some real action with respect to people adjusting their supply chain, changing their sourcing, changing where the products are coming from in the transportation there too.
- 7:27And I think the big winner there is going to be Latin America and Southeast Asia.
- 7:32And so going to be good to see some of the uncertainty go away and us starting to make some good decisions as about what the future of our supply chain is going to look like.
- 7:42And I think that will start in early September as well.
- 7:46Okay, and what are the economic implications of all of this?
- 7:53You know, as I mentioned to you before we went online, I didn't get much sleep last night and this is a question that drove me mad because I'm not an economist and I really read a lot of their
- 8:10stuff and I found almost every conclusion that you could think of somebody who was notable was taking the position.
- 8:21And so it's very difficult to try to look at this.
- 8:27And I saw lots of conflicts.
- 8:30I saw JP Morgan taking position saying X is going to happen, Y is going to happen, blue is going to happen and green is going to happen all over the place for one firm.
- 8:41And I thought what the heck is going on?
- 8:44And so I think what we need to do is realize there's a difference in perspective here.
- 8:51And it's not that one set of economists are correct and another one is wrong.
- 8:57It's you're looking at different things.
- 8:59And once I understood they were looking at different things, I was able to make some sense out of all this nonsense I was reading.
- 9:07There's two big issues.
- 9:10Number one, when we're making a economic projections of what's going to happen with all this stuff's going on, are we looking at the macro economy?
- 9:19Are we looking at a micro economy?
- 9:21Macro says everything's added together.
- 9:24Micro says, oh, let's look at semiconductors, oh, let's look at food and beverage, let's look at agriculture.
- 9:31And so there's two different perspectives there.
- 9:33If we look at a macro view, we say it's green if we look at a micro, we say it's purple and so it's different.
- 9:40The other thing is there's different time frames on this.
- 9:44Now they tell us what those time frames, but you tend to read past that.
- 9:48So some people are giving us what the results are in the short term.
- 9:54And now short term varies.
- 9:55Sometimes they're talking months, sometimes they're talking a year.
- 9:58But then there's other people that talk long term.
- 10:00But when they're talking long term, you don't know if they're talking one to five or they're talking one to 10 years.
- 10:05And so even the definitions of macro and micro and short term and long term are different.
- 10:11But when we get that all together, what I was able to do is to put together four economic forecasts based on macro, micro, long term, short term.
- 10:25The three I did were first of all the gross domestic product growth, secondly the impacts of tariffs on inflation.
- 10:36And third of all was looking at corporate profit profits.
- 10:41So let's start with GDP growth.
- 10:45What we see is overall everything we're looking at micro, macro, long term, short term, the numbers vary for overall gdp growth from 1% to over 5%.
- 10:59Now for GDP growth that's a huge range because there's people out there saying it's going to be 1.1, there's other people saying going to be 1.2 and someone else saying 1.3.
- 11:09So there's all these numbers.
- 11:10But here's how this breaks down from a macro short term perspective, which is by the way, the most accurate.
- 11:19We're going to add everyone together and we're going to look over short term.
- 11:23The, the view of GDP growth is very pessimistic.
- 11:28It's ranging between one and one and a half percent a year of GDP growth.
- 11:35That could almost begin to be called stagflation.
- 11:40Secondly, we can look at it from a macro long term point of view.
- 11:45So this is saying we're going to give it more Runway.
- 11:48And here we're seeing the projections range between 2 and a half and 3%.
- 11:53And so that is interesting that that's more than double what we're seeing from the short term perspective.
- 12:02Now is when we really get confusing when we look at the micro perspective because you might find somebody in micro is looking at AI industry and someone else is looking at EV electric vehicles.
- 12:14And we're going to get different views there.
- 12:16But in general the micro short term is optimistic and that has to do with green energy and artificial intelligence and logistics.
- 12:27And there they're saying the GDP growth in those three sectors, AI, green, energy and logistics is greater than 4%.
- 12:36And so that's a huge difference by looking at those three sectors.
- 12:40Now those are the three sectors that I see the greatest growth in, but it's still, it's greater than 4%.
- 12:47Now even more significant, if we look at micro long term, the view is very optimistic, very optimistic.
- 12:56And it's depending upon the amount of innovation a company has, depends upon the intelligent capital expenditure and it depends upon their supply chain optionality.
- 13:06But that is now looking at a growth of GDP of greater than 5% a year.
- 13:13So you can see we're going from a low which is the macro short term of 1% to the high which is micro at long term of over 5%.
- 13:25So huge differentiation.
- 13:27But now we have some intelligence into that differentiation and so I really feel like we've made a discovery there.
- 13:34The second category is the impact of tariffs on inflation.
- 13:38And this ranges across the four categories from no impact to moderate impact.
- 13:47For micro short term, what we're seeing is there's going to be a micro short, excuse me, macro short term.
- 13:56So this is looking at everybody over the next year we're going to find there's going to be some spikes, some one time jumps in prices, but it's really not going to have any sustained inflation.
- 14:07That's the projections which are being made by the economists.
- 14:10If we look at it from a macro long term perspective, what they're saying is there's no significant impact of inflation as a result of tariff.
- 14:22If we look at it from a micro short term perspective, micro is saying for items which have heavy import items passing along a portion of the increase is going to result in moderate inflation.
- 14:36So if you're buying everything from China and you know that we're going to hit China with a 30% tariff, your costs are going to go up and that would have a moderate impact on inflation.
- 14:47And then micro long term says that's where firms are going to be reconfiguring their supply chain, changing their sourcing and they're also going to be making investments in domestic capacity and therefore there will be no impact on inflation.
- 15:05So I have been taking the position that we're not going to see inflation as a result of tariffs.
- 15:12Well, what this says is Jim, you were right mostly, but you're wrong when you're looking at micro short term where the amount of product is heavily imported.
- 15:24And so it's interesting to take these categories and break them down.
- 15:28You get an answer which is much easier to justify and much less difficulty in Arguments and disagreements.
- 15:37The third thing I looked at was corporate profits and this varies from profits will be going down to profits will be very strong.
- 15:46So it literally goes from the alpha to omega on profits.
- 15:51If we look at the macro short term, macro short term margins are under pressure from wage growth and interest rates and profits will be down.
- 16:04So in a macro view, looking in at a short time frame, it's not going to be positive for corporate profits.
- 16:13Corporate profits are going to be down.
- 16:15If we look at a macro long term perspective, what we get is analysts have a different view on this.
- 16:22But basically what we're going to find is a compression in margins as a result of the, the innovation led expansion.
- 16:36So if what we're doing is, we're.
- 16:39Well, let me repeat that.
- 16:41From macro long term analysts vary widely from margin compression to innovation led expansion.
- 16:49I said that wrong.
- 16:51And so what they're saying is it's macro long term.
- 16:53It depends.
- 16:54If you really are doing things innovatively, you're making the investments, you're going to wind up doing well.
- 17:02But if what you do is sit on your hands and do what you're doing now, you're probably not going to do well and there's going to be profit erosion and margin compression going on.
- 17:14Then the last two is from a micro point of view.
- 17:17Micro short term, said firms are cutting costs, delaying capex and meeting profit targets.
- 17:24So in the short term, what companies are doing from a micro point of view, individual companies are saying let's cut our costs, let's not do the capital expenditures and let's keep our profits.
- 17:35So they come in where they're supposed to and then micro long term, what we're saying, once again, analysts are varying because it hinges on the investment strategy, it hinges on talent retention and it hinges on the optionality of
- 17:51supply chain.
- 17:53So not sure I made all that clear.
- 17:55But it's really interesting.
- 17:57You take these conflicting conflict, these forecasts and what we can see by looking macro, micro, long term, short term, they're not conflicting.
- 18:06There's some pretty good information there if we know when to apply whose forecast.
- 18:11But when you try to make one forecast overall is when you get in big trouble.
- 18:16So really interesting, I was really excited about that.
- 18:19Aha.
- 18:20Because I think that's not something that's well understood.
- 18:24Yeah.
- 18:24And it's, it's certainly not talked about in that fashion.
- 18:27And when you break it down like that, it makes perfect sense.
- 18:30Yeah, it, it, that's what I thought.
- 18:32Oh wow.
- 18:32I understand this now.
- 18:35Okay.
- 18:36So with all that said, Jim, what Should business leaders do to ride out this storm?
- 18:42Well, I think there's a lot of things and I was in my micro macro, long term thing and I thought, no, no, no, put that away, you already did that one.
- 18:52So what I did is I looked at this and I said there's really two ways to look at this.
- 18:56Number one is from a mindset point of view, what, what should be my mindset?
- 19:02And then secondly, what are the types of actions we should be taking?
- 19:07And so, so the mindset are things that we've talked about on these broadcasts before.
- 19:15Some of them, some of them we haven't.
- 19:17One that we have talked about is we have to have the mindset to understand that the new normal is disruption.
- 19:25And therefore leaders need to deploy scenario planning as opposed to believing that your forecasts are right, your forecasts are wrong.
- 19:34We don't know what's going to happen.
- 19:36And so we need to have a scenario.
- 19:37And if this happens, we're going to do this.
- 19:39If this happens, we're going to do this.
- 19:40If this happens, we're going to do this.
- 19:42Secondly, we have to grasp that optionality and resilience are more important than cost minimization.
- 19:50You know, when we were doing just in time, if you look at what we were doing from 2015 to 2020, my goodness sakes alive, we did a great job of optimizing from a cost point of view, but boy,
- 20:02then when Covid hit, we all got caught short.
- 20:04We wound up not being able to ship, we wound up not being able to keep our factories open because we didn't have the parts.
- 20:11And so what we need to do is develop optionality and resilience.
- 20:15That's one we've talked about in the past.
- 20:18The third one is, rather than choosing one forecast and believe it, what smart leaders will do is they're going to run parallel playbooks.
- 20:27And so what they're going to have on their desk is going to have a, you know, a red catalog, a yellow catalog and a green catalog.
- 20:34And in there the folders they're going to have, here's what happens if it's going bad, here's what's happened kind of in the middle, and here's what happens when it's going well.
- 20:43And so we're going to have these different playbooks that are going to let us look at most likely optimistic and pessimistic views.
- 20:49And that's going to give us the ability to quickly respond with our optionality.
- 20:55We also need to understand when it's yellow, when it's Green and when it's red.
- 20:59And so we had them have to monitor leading indicators, looking at consumer settlement, looking at treasury yields, looking at import volumes.
- 21:09And we got to use those to say, okay, I now need, I need to yank my yellow notebook out because we're in a yellow time.
- 21:18Oh, wow.
- 21:18I need to put the yellow one away and I need to grab the green network, green notebook.
- 21:24And then the last thing I think we need to look at under our mindset is we need to make sure that we communicate openly and honestly to all stakeholders about the level of uncertainty we're dealing with and the
- 21:39amount of optionality that's therefore needed.
- 21:42Sometimes we find that when people maintain their optionality, they say, ah, that guy can't make a decision.
- 21:48Well, no, it's the world won't let you make a decision.
- 21:52And therefore you have to have the ability to go to the green notebook, the yellow notebook or the red notebook, depending how things will go.
- 21:59That's kind of my mindset answer to that question.
- 22:03Getting more specific then instead of looking at mindset, but looking at what are specific actions we can take.
- 22:10I think that's very clear.
- 22:12One of the things we need to do is we need to rethink our global sourcing and rethink our supply chain.
- 22:19I'm calling this re globalization.
- 22:21So we got to look at should we reshore, is there enough automation that we can do that we can afford US labor, or should we nearshore by bringing it someplace closer to home?
- 22:33Obviously, the closer you are to the customer, the better off you are.
- 22:38Although maybe you don't want to get too close because that's going to result in some tariff exposure.
- 22:43So we want to reshore and nearshore based upon the tariff exposure and the cost of production.
- 22:50We definitely want to look at diversity of suppliers.
- 22:54What's going to happen in China, what's going to happen in India really open at this point.
- 23:00We'll talk more about that in a few minutes.
- 23:03But what we need to do is not overly rely on one country.
- 23:08I've seen people say, well, oh well, I'm going to diversify from China and I'm going to move to Vietnam.
- 23:14Well, but your raw materials in Vietnam all came from China.
- 23:18So have you really diversified from China?
- 23:20We got to truly diversify and so we want to avoid over reliance in any one region.
- 23:26We don't want to be all in Southeast Asia, we don't want to be all in Latin America, we don't want to all be in Africa.
- 23:32We need to have a mix so that when bad things happen, we still can operate well.
- 23:38And then the third thing under rethinking global sourcing and supply chain is to do some tariff engineering to modify product designs or materials so that we can shift the tariff classification and therefore reduce duty rates.
- 23:53So that's number one, rethinking global sourcing and supply chain.
- 23:57Number two is leverage trade agreements and trade zones.
- 24:02So get ourselves into free trade zones.
- 24:06Tap into places where free trade zones can really help you.
- 24:10Look at USMCA and look at how we can eliminate tariffs by where we bring it in and how we bring it in and where we store it.
- 24:19Look at free trade zones, store or assemble goods before they're officially entering the country, before they enter the domestic market and defer those duties and then also use duty drawback to make sure we recover tariffs on things that
- 24:35have already been paid elsewhere.
- 24:37And then the third category, one was the sourcing.
- 24:41Two was the leveraging agreements.
- 24:44Number three is using technology.
- 24:47So we want to automate tariff management.
- 24:50Obviously, with de minimis going away, there's a lot of issues with respect to managing the customs process and lots of change going on there.
- 25:00If we're doing E comm from overseas, we want to look at data analytics and risk forecasting and so that we can use predictive models to anticipate what the marketplace is going to want.
- 25:13And then we want a big one is we want to deploy AI based logistics command centers.
- 25:21Now you notice I'm using the word command center as opposed to control centers.
- 25:26Control centers, Control towers, as we call them.
- 25:30Control towers did a good job of giving us visibility, but we need to go well beyond visibility and we now need to have visibility, orchestration and execution.
- 25:41When I go from a control tower, which is visibility, to a command center, what I'm doing is I'm adding to the visibility in the control tower, orchestration and execution.
- 25:53And now I'm actually automating the execution of the supply chain.
- 25:59Big, big, big opportunity.
- 26:01So those are the three categories I look at as specific things we need to do.
- 26:04We need to look at our sourcing, we need to look at trade agreements, and we need to look at how we can use technology to reduce cost of our operation and make sure we're more responsive to the VUCA
- 26:16that we're all experiencing.
- 26:19Okay, and so Jim, where do you see all of this ending up?
- 26:25Well, if I really knew the answer to that one, Dave, you and I would go off and be placing some bets around the world on things that are happening.
- 26:35And so this is not something we can get overly specific with, but we've had Trump for 220 days.
- 26:42Today is President Trump's 220th day of his second term.
- 26:48And it's kind of easy to see from a big picture point of view what's going to happen.
- 26:56Where we are right now is we are having a BRICS plus versus an Americas.
- 27:04So north and South America, Europe, Japan and South Korea struggle.
- 27:09Okay, so these two sides, I mean it's down to a two man fight.
- 27:14Now we got the BRICS plus people versus the Americas, Europe, Japan and South Korea.
- 27:24Now if we look at those two and we look at the gross domestic product, what you quickly find out is that the Americas, Europe, Japan and South Korea are double the GDP of the BRICS plus countries.
- 27:40And so the BRICS countries need the Americas, Europe, Japan and South Korea more than America's Europe, Japan and South Korea.
- 27:53So if I was betting on a horse race, I would put twice as much money on the Americas, Europe, Japan and South Korea.
- 28:01As I went on the BRICS nation.
- 28:04However, BRICS is still substantial and it needs to be looked at.
- 28:11BRICS needs us more because they need the exporting into the Americas, Europe, Japan and South Korea to replace what they're going to be losing by getting in a fight with us.
- 28:26And so they're at a little bit of a disadvantage.
- 28:30And so therefore it's a better bet to bid the bet on America's Europe, Japan and South Korea at this point.
- 28:37However, this isn't happening at a time where everyone is sitting there happy and smiling.
- 28:43In fact, quite to the contrary, China has huge, huge, huge problems.
- 28:49China has the aging curve where there's a structural drag on the number of old people versus the number of young people.
- 28:59This Democratics, the democratic demographics divide has been in place.
- 29:05We've been talking about it for over 20 years.
- 29:08But what we're seeing, there's fewer younger people, there's fewer workers, we have rising number of people in on pensions and there's a very slow productivity gains because we're not really putting the work the younger, more energetic people.
- 29:26So China has an aging curve problem.
- 29:30China is still an export economy.
- 29:32It totally depends upon the west and it has too much production capacity to just feed the BRICS countries.
- 29:43And so they need to find more consumers and so they about 30% of China's exports go to the US and Europe alone.
- 29:54And so they really need to how are they going to make that up?
- 29:57China also obviously has a real estate bubble which is affecting them in a very significant way.
- 30:03And their strategy, therefore to this point, and it still remains, is to delay.
- 30:10What China wants to do is not make a decision, not make a deal until they're in a stronger position.
- 30:17And they're not going to be in a stronger position until they understand where Russia and India are.
- 30:22It's Russia, India and China versus the United States and Europe.
- 30:26That's how the battle is shaping up now.
- 30:29But China's aging curve, their economy, the real estate bubble gives them some real heartburn.
- 30:37In a similar way, Russia obviously has some real major problems unto themselves.
- 30:45They are not able financially to keep pace with the United States.
- 30:50They are increasingly constrained.
- 30:54And the only hope they have of their economy maintaining strong is if oil prices stay strong.
- 31:01If oil prices go down, so will Russia.
- 31:04They have nothing to fall back on.
- 31:09And so if we look at the fragility of the Russian economy, we see this heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy dependence on oil revenue.
- 31:20We see that they have drained the wealth fund.
- 31:24In May of 2025, in the same period as a year earlier, May of 2024, the wealth fund is down by a factor of five.
- 31:37Okay?
- 31:38And so the wealth fund was 113 billion.
- 31:44It's now down to 36 billion.
- 31:46And so their fallback position is, number one, it's in the billions, not trillions.
- 31:52Number two, it's fallen by a factor of five.
- 31:55This is being aggravated by the war on Ukraine.
- 32:00And so although Russia may be winning the physical war, the war is draining their economy.
- 32:06They've got a lot of people leaving Russia.
- 32:08They got a lot of companies leaving Russia.
- 32:10And so there's some real problems.
- 32:12The Western sanctions have hit Russia very hard.
- 32:16And this is in particular their banking, their technology, their energy sectors are really, really, really down.
- 32:23So Russia's economy is very, very, very fragile.
- 32:27So we have China, that's got huge problems.
- 32:30We've got Russia, that's very fragile.
- 32:32And these are two of the three countries that are going to be our enemies.
- 32:36The third one, of course, is India.
- 32:39To date, India has done an excellent job of what they call a multi alignment strategy where they don't pick sides.
- 32:48And when you say to India, do you want to go with the red one or the green one?
- 32:51They say yes, they want to do both.
- 32:53They want to go with both the BRICS nations and they want to go with the Americas and Europe to the dance.
- 33:02And that's been allowed to date.
- 33:05And their hope is what they're going to do is come out of this and be the global bridge builder.
- 33:12That's their terminology, that's what they're calling this now.
- 33:14And the global bridge builder is they want to ride this neutral position into global influence.
- 33:23And so they're the ones calling the shot for the whole world.
- 33:26And that's their goal.
- 33:28And to date, they've been able to do that fairly well.
- 33:31The challenge that remains here is President Trump going to allow them to do that.
- 33:36President Trump now has a 50% tariff because India will not drop its purchase of oil from Russia.
- 33:44That 50% will put Russia out of business.
- 33:48I mean, put India out of business.
- 33:50If India then.
- 33:51So they got a choice.
- 33:52Either go out of business because they can't handle a 50% tariff or stop selling, start buying Russian oil.
- 34:00If they stop buying Russian oil, then Russia goes down.
- 34:02And so there's some real, you know, conflicts going on here.
- 34:06And so it remains to be seen what Trump is going to do with India.
- 34:09That's a major, major, major move that takes place.
- 34:13And so no one really knows what's going to happen.
- 34:17But there's a couple options that seem to make the most sense.
- 34:21Number one, Trump decides he's going to allow India to maintain the neutral position, and therefore the conflict between the BRICS countries and the American, European, Japan and South Korea is going to continue.
- 34:39So that struggle will continue, and Trump's going to fall.
- 34:44India is going to maintain their neutral position, and they are going to continue to buy oil from China, buy oil from Russia, and they are now going to be in a position of neutrality.
- 35:01And that's Trump's call.
- 35:02I don't see Trump doing that, but that's a likely scenario.
- 35:06What might come in and what people are talking about, to me, the more likely strategy is that Trump forces India's hand to join our side of the fight and leave brics, therefore stop selling Russia the oil.
- 35:24Therefore, Russia will then collapse.
- 35:27And in that situation, Russia's going to collapse.
- 35:31And what would happen then?
- 35:32India is neutral, and then China and the US Would do a deal.
- 35:36That's China's strategy.
- 35:37China says, let's see what Trump does with this India and Russia thing based on what they do, then we will do a deal with the United States based on the terms which exist at that time.
- 35:49And so I think where we are is we've got the markets that Beck's needs, they need into our markets.
- 36:01If we don't let them into our markets, their economies are going to suffer.
- 36:05Russia and China already have significant economy problems.
- 36:09And so the one that's kind of holding the cards is India.
- 36:13Do they stay neutral or not?
- 36:15But if they stay neutral, it's up to Trump, not up to India.
- 36:18If Trump puts the pedal down and said 50% tariffs in place unless you quit buying Russian oil, then India will come to our side and then Russia will go down and then China will do a deal with us.
- 36:31And that's how it's going to end.
- 36:32If Trump kind of steps back and says, well, do whatever you want, India, you can be neutral.
- 36:39What we're going to see when India remains neutral is the battle is going to continue, and it remains to be seen where that turns out.
- 36:48I can't imagine why Trump would do that, but that's the second most likely scenario.
- 36:53So it's going to be interesting.
- 36:55This is going to occur in the next six months.
- 37:00And so in the next six months, India is either going to become this global bridge maker or they're going to wind up being in the category of the Americas, Europe, Japan and South Korea.
- 37:18And so very interesting time to be watching what's happening and to see what President Trump does.
- 37:24As President Trump likes to say, he's holding the cards.
- 37:28And so it's going to be interesting to see where this heads.
- 37:31Fascinating stuff, Jim, appreciate your insights as always.
- 37:34We'll certainly be watching this in the coming weeks.
- 37:37And and we will talk to you soon.
- 37:39Super Dave, thanks so much.