Mia Wong (11:45)
This is Mia Wong with Tariff Talk. So, obviously the biggest tariff news right now is the impending Supreme Court ruling on the legality of a broad swath of the tariffs that Trump has imposed using unbelievably dubious legal and economic authority. And by unbelievably dubious, I mean it is so patently illegal. It is an astounding demonstration of the complete abdication of the Supreme Court's pretensions at being one of the branches of government that this hasn't already been overturned, but this ruling has not dropped yet. Everyone's waiting. So in the meantime, what we have is a bunch of Trump administration officials have been going on TV and talking about trade policy, and they're saying something that we've been hearing for a while now, which is that they believe that they can use different set of legal authority to impose the same tariffs. Whether they can do this or not is. I mean, they shouldn't be able to do this. Like, all of the, all of the authority they're using is pretty ridiculous. But this has been. This has been their strategy. They've been reiterating their strategy. On the other side, we've seen some interesting movement in terms of the opposition, which is that Costco has become sort of the biggest company to join in this trend of companies going to court with lawsuits to try to recoup the money that they've spent on these tariffs, because if the Supreme Court ruling overturns the legality of these tariffs, these companies can get their money back retroactively. Costco is the biggest company we've seen so far sort of move to attempt to do this remedy through the courts. So we will keep an eye on this. And this is, you know, I think especially if this comes overturned, we're going to see a lot of companies try to make moves for this. This is something that is going to piss off the Trump administration because they've been talking a giant game about how, oh, these are going to fund the, like, $2,000 tariff checks you're never getting. Trump is literally talking about. And this is the, you know, this is an old sort of right wing thing, but he's talking about how, oh, tariff revenue is going to replace income tax, which, no, it's not like just nonsense gibberish. Numbers don't work, orders the magnitude off. Just nonsense, can't work. But, you know, these are things that they're saying. And there's probably going to be increasing conflict between the sectors of capital that just want their money back from these tariffs and the Trump administration, which, you know, wants this money for its, you know, nebulous political purposes. There's been some sort of interesting political developments in terms of Trump and Lula. So people will probably remember from listening to the show that there have been very, very high turfs on Brazil that are effectively political tariffs for actually putting one Jair Bolsonaro in prison for, you know, the mere crime of attempting to overthrow the government to install himself as the ruler of Brazil. Now, there has been, over the past few weeks, there's been some sort of ratcheting down of a lot of the tariffs. There's been a bunch of goods that have been exempt from the tariffs as part of Trump's sort of widespread efforts to like, lower food prices because there's a bunch of food goods that are being exempt from this stuff. And there was also, very recently we got an actual call between Trump and Lula which seems to have gone fairly well. You know, at least it seems to have been cordial. The two seem to both be coming out of it saying like, oh, we agree on things, it's going to go great. And this is to a large extent an attempt to do a replay of Lula's positive relationship with the Bush administration the last time he was in power. Where, and this is, you know, this has been a trend in the, in the sort of the original pink tide and in this government where you have a kind of mix of the sort of pink Thai center left governments in Latin America where Lula has traditionally been the one who's been sort of playing with the U.S. more. And as we're seeing right now, you have the US Gearing up for potentially a war in Venezuela and there's been a whole bunch of conflict with Colombia. But Lula seems to be trying to sort of play the role that he played in the 2000s. We'll see how that goes. Trump is astonishingly, significantly more unstable than George W. Bush, which is just. Good Lord. Oh, God. Okay, enough. Oh, my God. They finally found a president who's less coherent and more unhinged than George W. Bush. The final piece of news that we need to touch on is the US's chief trade negotiator gave an interview with Politico and this is per Yahoo News, basically talked to Politico and told them that Trump is considering, you know, is talking about leaving or renegotiating the usmca, which is the trade agreements that he negotiated to replace NAFTA in 2020.
