Transcript
Stephanie Ruhl (0:00)
And I am Stephanie Ruhl, and I don't care if you need one, but I am definitely taking a deep breath right now. I suspect you need one, too. It is day 81 of the second Trump administration and we have got a lot of money, power, politics to talk about.
Peter Navarro (0:15)
Look for historical parallel. And it's really, really hard. The closest thing you can come to will be wartime, perhaps, perhaps, you know, getting into a war we didn't need to get into, we could say Vietnam, we could say Iraq. But outside of that, outside of a, you know, a national security, wartime kind of thing, I can't think of a president who has done or to undercut his own presidency so early, so dramatically and affect so many other lives. Right. A lot of presidents make mistakes in their early days, although not usually in their second term. They nominate somebody who gets in trouble. There may be a scandal, something they forgot to tell us or they didn't want to tell us. But I can't think of anybody who has done more to sort of. So worldwide uncertainty drain out literally trillions of dollars worth of market cap for all these essentially retirement savings for many Americans. Not to mention the uncertainty in Washington, where tens of thousands of people have suddenly been told they're out of a job and services are no longer going to be provided that they had come to depend on. And foreign aid to places that are suffering from disease and hunger. So much has happened in just 11 weeks. There is no parallel, I think, in American history.
Stephanie Ruhl (1:27)
Here's what I want to say. It has been over a week since this trade disaster began. And I have spent that week speaking to investors here and abroad. And what I feel most tonight is scared. Scared that what we are facing is a crisis of confidence. Confidence in us, the United States of America. And what I have not heard from any of the people that I speak to is exactly what might restore that confidence in the United States, at least not right now. Yes, the markets rallied yesterday, but that is only because we avoided the 50 plus percent tariffs across the globe. But the reality has set in today because we still have the rest of these tariffs and the markets continue to sink, both the bond and stock market, in part because the basis by which we're negotiating trade is not rooted in truth. And for those who believe countries are scrambling to make a deal because they were so panicked about the enormous tariffs and now they're much lower, my question is, what is that deal? What do you think the likes of Vietnam can do to erase our trade deficit? You know what the answer is? They can't and if you want to ensure all of our manufacturing, that's if you want to do that. What Peter Navarro talked about, what Howard, let me talk about, you want to do that. It'll take trillions of dollars and 20 years to reconfigure the global supply chain and bring it all home. And for our allies in the west, those developed countries, they are certainly not rushing to partner back up with us, not with a US President who goes on national TV laughing, saying, they're all kissing my ass. It is safe to say that the perch we and our American exceptionalism sat on even a few months ago has certainly been lowered. We've got an agriculture secretary who tells us, build a chicken coop in your backyard because eggs are expensive. We have a defense secretary sharing military secrets in a group chat. We are potentially lawlessly firing thousands of federal workers and defunding science while we buy crypto. We have lost an enormous amount of credibility and trust. But what scares me is that every investor I speak to, even some who support this president, has given me the same message. If the bond market continues to drop and drop and drop, you know where it goes? It bankrupts the country. Something Donald Trump knows a lot about.