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Single best idea, What did we invent over twenty years ago? What we tried to event working off of all sorts of good analogs. You wouldn't believe the number of people that influenced this was the quality of the conversation. And it doesn't mean just get a lot of fancy muckety MUCKs and have them on twenty four to seven. It means a set of people. Lori Calvicina was fabulous today on a small stock effect and the courage to be in the markets, said some really good fixed income people.
The other day, Ian Lincoln would be moo capital markets and on and on. But when it's something in macroeconomics or international economics, you have to go to the source. The source in America is at Dartmouth College. Douglas Irwin thirty years ago, as incredibly young at the time, wrote a book called Against the Tide, which was absolutely definitive
about the history of free trade. And I went right to him on the first question, President Trump's fixation on a gilded age, his fixation on William McKinley.
Well, I'd say the myth that the US economy grew in the late nineteenth century when we became an industrial power because of the tariff There's a classic case of correlation not being causation. So there are a lot of reasons why the US became an industrial power. After the Civil War up until World War One, we had massive immigration, not many people in come administration and mentioned that we were the recipient of major capital inflows from Britain and
other countries. We were adopting technology from then the technological leader of Britain. We are pretty much open to the world except in trade. So we did have high tariffs, but they did promote manufacturing a bit. But if you look where the productivity growth was, it was in the service sector. It was railroads and then later electrification and telecommunications. It wasn't just manufacturing and becoming rich because of the tariff walls.
I will editorialize here with Doug Irwin of Dartmouth that the set of reasons there of McKinley, and before McKinley, in the time of Blaine and grew, I call him President Grover Cleveland Alexander. President Grover Cleveland Alexander was a picture named after Groover Cleveland. It's a side story But the answer here is the capital inflow from the United Kingdom was extraordinary. Alan Nevins nails this, the great historian
of Grover Cleveland. The gift that America got not even post Civil War, but eighteen after the Panic of eighteen seventy two, eighteen eighty onwards. The wall of money that came into America from the United Kingdom, to me is the great catalyst to our technological progress in the productivity that Professor Irwin talks about over the arch of Megdan de size long century, as he would call it. Another expert that we talked to today was god A Macunda
of Yale University. What a spirited discussion here. He was just flat out heated Macunda of Yale on tariffs.
If they don't realize it now, they will soon. The United States government has been uniquely stable for a couple of centuries, just basically longer than any other country in the world, and American business has been the extraordinary beneficiary of that. If that goes away, it will have consequences in ways that we cannot predict, but that are gargantuan.
I'll just say as a general rule, it's when the things that you so deeply believe about the world that you don't even think about them turn out not to be true, that you have the biggest impact. And here is one where the basic underlying principle of everything in global economics and everything in global foreign policy has been the US government kind of knows what it's doing. That assumption is breaking while we speak.
Got a mccunda. I'm sure we'll speak to him here in the coming weeks. Is well. I really can't say enough about the effort this weekend on this story. We go into midnight tonight, I feel like Cinderellic and midnight things are going to change with the tariff. Alex Steele was actually brilliant when we were off Mike today about really can we get to midnight. Maybe something will happen
today to adjust the tariff story for tomorrow. On your commute across the nation, Apple Carplate, Android Auto in Philadelphia, Sirius XM Channel one twenty one. In Kansas City. I don't know what they do in Kansas City. Can you tell I'm rooting for the Eagles? I think I think so. But what we know is on YouTube, you subscribe to Bloomberg Podcast. It's building each and every day on YouTube podcast. This is single best I do
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