Transcript
Felix Hamlin (0:10)
Hello and welcome to Sleep Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Hamlin of Axios. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of the New York Times. Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios. Hi.
Elizabeth Spires (0:24)
Hi.
Felix Hamlin (0:25)
Should we talk about my, my native country this week, the United Kingdom? We did a trade deal with you Yanks. So let's talk about that. We shall talk about Bill Gates, who is speeding up his philanthropy and wants to die with nothing. We are going to talk about OpenAI and the degree to which it is actually a nonprofit or not. We have a Slate plus on movies, tariffs, Hollywood and boilers about thunderbolts. It's exciting. It's all coming up on Sleep Money. So I think we should start this week with the art of the deal and Donald Trump's astonishing success in agreeing to a trade deal with Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, or I should say of the United Kingdom should be precise here on Slate Money. And it's a very interesting deal because the American tariffs on Britain didn't really come down, but the British tariffs on America did come down. And Kia's like, yeah, we can do this. But the American tariffs on Britain did come down in one particular respect. In particular there was a couple, but the main one is cars because there was this like across the board tariff of 10% that Trump is putting on everyone and that seems to be non negotiable and no one can lower that. And Britain was always at 10% from the beginning. So it had very little down room below that to go. But there was also a 25% tariff on cars and Britain exports a non negligible number of cars. And those cars, it now turns out it's cheaper for Britain to export cars to America now than it is for US Companies to assemble cars in Canada and ship them across the Canadian border. So that's interesting. It doesn't really make a huge difference to America because number one, Britain is like the 11th largest exporter to the United States of goods. It's just not a huge player. And number two, these cars are not everyday cars. They're like Rolls Royces and Bentleys and McLarens and Jaguars and stuff like that. But it's an interesting sort of indication of the weirdness that we are going to be in. As Trump does more and more of these trade deals.
Emily Peck (2:48)
It really does seem like this just isn't that much of a deal. People are excited because it's the first one and the markets liked it because it's okay, they can make deals. This will relax now, but like you said, doesn't change the 10% tariff, which, you know, six months ago would have been considered insane and high. It's a deal with our closest ally. As everyone said a million times when this was announced Thursday, we have a spin special relationship with the uk this was the easiest deal to get done. So I don't know that it tells us. I mean, it tells us a lot. It tells us that the administration isn't looking to compromise on that 10% flat tariff. It's going to make a whole big to do about nothing. I don't know what it. What else it tells us. It tells us that Rolls Royces are going to be okay.