L’accordo di Trump con il Giappone è davvero pessimo

L’accordo di Trump con il Giappone è davvero pessimo

I want to get to to Japan and then I want to get to to uh August 1 because um I’m curious as to how how nervous you think Wall Street is uh or might be. But in terms of Japan, so in this specific deal, the it’s a 15% tax on working Americans uh on on all Japanese products. Um which is a great way to finance um tax cuts for the wealthy. If you don’t want to let people know that’s what you’re doing, you call it tariffs. Um supposedly Japan is to buy a 100 Boeing planes. Um, I’d be a little nervous myself, uh, particularly where Boeing is going. Uh, Japan is going to boost rice purchases by 75%. If there’s very little rice purchases, a boosting of 75%, you know, 75% of of zero is still zero, I I would imagine. But um they’re going to buy other agricultural products and then they’re supposedly I mean again it’s so hard to know because you know this is just Trump uh you know maybe in an ambient haze uh tweeting this stuff out but uh they’re going to invest $550 billion according to Trump in the US and uh the US is going to get 90% of the profits. I’m not even sure I know what that means, but um do you have an idea of what that means or what that could mean or and isn’t it doesn’t it create some type of imbalance if we in terms of dollar denominate like the the strength of the dollar? If these investments come in from outside uh the country, it’s going to um skew the value of the dollar such that it’s going to expand our trade deficit. Uh it sounds like uh yes. So um I’ve been on this through what’s what’s the expression? Written in this rodeo before. Yeah. Um I ride in a lot of rodeos. Um the so I’ve seen this play before which is he announces a lot of stuff on truth social and at this point um often there’s never actually an agreement. So the deal deal with Britain looked very similar and they had a big poster and impressive numbers but you actually read what the framework agreement said. said over time Britain will work to open up its markets and change its biocurity laws so that Americans get access to British markets. That remains simply a talking point. That’s all that was the deal. And then what you can do is you can say how big are those markets and it’s billions of dollars and it seems very impressive but they actually did nothing. Um and so I think the idea that we should do serious economic analysis by reading a tweet is a little bit beneath all of us. Um although I’m I’m that’s all I needed to hear frankly. I mean um you know there’s I have no doubt. Let me teach the audience something that is important. Um because Trump falls for this all the time. So first of all the Boeings they were probably already going to buy and they just create an announcable. Um and by the way the Japanese government doesn’t buy Boeings. Japanese airlines choose to and they do so based on profitability. Um, the other part of this is when you say things like, “We’re going to sell this much soybeans.” When you’re talking about commodities, commodities are literally that, commodities. So, they’re going to buy it from the US instead of buying it from a different neighbor. And then everyone who would have bought from the US will buy from that neighbor instead. And all you’ve done is changed which ships are going to which ports. But you’re not changing anything. Um, and that’s because this is not a specific good made by the US. So if they said they were going to buy a lot more of a specific Americanmade medication, that would be an increase in demand. This is just going to be a reallocation of demand around the globe and does nothing for American farmers. So the the the total out or export of let’s say if it’s rice from the US is not going to change. It’s just going to we’re going to be sending it to Japan as opposed to uh Britain or uh South America or wherever. Okay. So, uh in terms of this uh uh August 1st deadline, he said it’s sort of firm, not totally firm, but firm. Uh and like at what point I mean as this is going on I would imagine that Canada, European countries, Asian countries are saying you know um this is all well and good for him but for us we need to be able to have something that we can plan on and we’re just going to find alternate um uh markets uh both in terms of what we want to buy and what we want to sell. And uh every day that we have to make those plans puts the United States in a weaker position. Um and where where are we going to be at the beginning of August? And how nervous do you think the financial markets, the Wall Street, I mean, the various constituencies that would be impacted by this are of any of this stuff coming to fruition, right? A lot of questions here, so I’ll pick some up and you’ll come back to the ones that I missed. Okay. So, first of all, how scared is Wall Street? The answer turns out to be surprisingly little. Um, so one fact is true. There’s an unbroken streak every time Trump trusts his instincts, increases tariffs, for instance, or threatens to fire Fed chair J. Pal, every time he leans into his instincts, market’s fault. The only thing that’s changed over time is by how much. So, at the start of the Trump administration, and this was Liberation Day, he would say something outrageous like announce the Liberation Day tariffs and markets would tank and then that would lead him to UN um to revise what he wanted to do. Um, and what’s happened is you’ve all heard this word taco. Trump always chickens out that people have understood that the outrageous first claim is not anything he means. And so, as a result, when he speaks now, markets don’t believe him. So, markets are now falling when he moves into tariffs, but only by a very small amount. So small that the president doesn’t get the feedback he needs that this is a very, very bad idea. Markets are confident that he’s going to check it out. I am not. And I am not because there are other policy domains for instance immigration where he’s taken really very very extreme views and charged ahead irrespective of external advice and what um external groups want and there’s no reason to think that he wouldn’t do that again. So to characterize this this is a debate between is he tariff man the guy who actually loves tariffs and there’s good evidence that maybe that’s who he is versus is this taco man the guy who always chickens out. Um if he is tariff man, this is a very very high set of tariffs. Actually, it’s now currently we may be on track for the August 1st tariffs to be higher than the liberation day tariffs. It depends what day of the week you look at. And so if you were worried on liberation day, you should be worried today is my view on this. Um what uh what do you have what’s your sense of of how other countries are sort of moving away? I mean I there there’s a real also broad sense I mean you mentioned you know uh US we have PhDs and this and that there’s a brain drain there I mean and it’s sort of the same dynamic right like it’s just people are turning away from the United States. Look you know we’ve all been to middle school and you’re sitting in the middle school cafeteria and there’s the kid who insists on farting at the lunch table. We’re that kid. um you know we uh we are the kid who farts at the at the lunch table and that makes us a less attractive friend and what happens is people get up and they make other friends. Um and so that is at a very literal level what’s happening right now. So the European Union is talking to uh the group of Asia-Pacific nations that formed what was once called the Trans-Pacific Partnership until the United States dropped out of it. Um but more generally um people want friends who are friendly and they want friends who are reliable. What may not be clear to an American audience is this trade war has been the front page of news in almost every country around the world more days than not. This is just such a central issue. Um and people understand how they’re being treated. And so um if you thought about this through a foreign for foreign policy lens and I want to emphasize I’m not a foreign policy guy but we have made the United States less central to the world economy and it’s not just tariffs of course there’s immigration whenever immigrants come over here and have a good life they become more connected their families back home we understand each other and so on but also international students um they’re terrified of coming over here um international conferences are no longer being held here because you can’t do that in case people won’t get in across the border. And while the US will host the next Olympics, if these are our border policies, we’ll never host the Olympics again. And so all of this means, yes, we’re a big country and yes, we’re a rich country, but increasingly we will become disconnected. If you’re President Trump, that was the goal. If you’re the rest of us, you understand the richness that comes from being integrated with the rest of the world. The richness is I sat down and I looked at my dinner plate last night and the salmon came from Norway and the dill came from Israel and the rice might have come from the US but it might have come from China and on and on it goes. It’s the confluence of ideas and the people and that all come together in this extraordinary melting pot. And we are not going to be that. And less that sound alarmist, let me remind your viewers that prior to Hitler, the US was the center of learning in the world. That’s where the world’s professors and scientists went to profess and science together. Uh Hitler basically kicked out the Jewish scientists. They all left Germany and they ended up in the US. And the next 80 years of economic history is that Germany flounded. The US has created millions of incredibly highquality jobs as we have created the technologies of the future. Um, if we are unreliable, that will not be our future. Hey folks,

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