Als media.
Welcome to it happened here, a podcast that's about trade policy. Now I'm your host, Via Wong. This is amazingly going to be the fun one of all of these episodes. It's about working tariffs, so it's gonna be a long week. Yeah. Yeah, that was the voice of the singular Garrison Davis, the one the only Yes. Hello, I'm excited to hear about tariffs. It's tariff talk here and it could happen here one of my favorite favorite topics. I guess now, all right, Garish,
you're putting you on the spot. What is a tariff? Uh, it's basically googling tariff. No, A tariff is when Trump says China's bad, so he makes China pay extra money to sell their goods to Americans, and luckily China pays for all of it, and the American consumer gets off with a boot sting economy. That's at least what I've heard. Yeah, so, unfortunately for every one, I don't know, I guess I guess there's some acceleration this. Two are probably really excited about this, most certainly.
But the way this actually works is Okay, So the government sets up a tariff and that means if anyone is bringing a good into the US, they have to pay the tariff on it, and that money goes to the government. So okay, that There's been a long history of tariffs in the US. This was a huge domestic policy think, particularly in the eighteen hundreds. That's really fucking boring.
The incredibly short version of it is that the thing about tariffs is that, especially like tariffs on a specific sector, is that they're good for you manufacturing that thing kind of mostly, and they're bad for anyone trying to buy
that good because it's now more expensive. So Trump's plan, and we're going to get into a bit more detail about this, because there's parts of Trump's tariff plan that everyone seems to have forgotten about for some reason that I don't know why they've forgotten about.
But the basic plan is to impose something like a ten to twenty percent tariff on all goods that enter the US from anywhere. There's specifically one for Mexico, but the numbers on what the Mexico tariff is changes every time he opens his mouth. Sometimes it's like twenty five percent. There's one where it's like two hundred and fifty percent, of course, two interchangeable percentages. Yeah, and then for China, it's supposed to be a tariff of somewhere between sixty
sixty percent is the most commonly sided number. But he's also set one hundred percent tariff once again basically the same thing. Yeah, and so you know, part of what we, unfortunately the rest of us who live in the normal world, have to do is figure out what is actually going to happen if we get, for example, twenty percent tariffs on all goods entering the US and a sixty percent tariff on goods from China. So the first thing you need to understand. I think most people kind of get
this now. But the thing about a tariff is that you pay for it. So the way that it works in general is that this is just an additional cost for the company that's doing it, that's doing that like moving the good around, right, and so they are almost always going to just pass that cost directly on to you. Obviously, sometimes we've talked about pricing, the way that pricing works a lot on this show. Companies tend not to want to raise prices, largely because of their effects on consumer
happiness and brand loyalty. And stuff like that.
So sometimes people will just eat shit on it. But if you're talking about a sixty percent tariff, like you, the sixty percent tariff is going to be paid for by you.
So that means that anytime we buy something that's either from Mexico or China or any of the other countries, that this will be applied to the easiest way for these for these companies to get around the tariff is just to pass off the cost to the consumer.
Yeah, and it's actually worse than that because and this is something I don't think people really understand when you think about global trade, right, people tend to think about trade as something that happens between countries, and this is something that was an old you know dream, like the anti globalization movement. People sort of understood this and kind of don't now. Trade doesn't actually really happened between countries. Most trade is one company, an international company, moving a
resource from one country to another. Right, So, like trade is fucking Amazon moving something from a warehouse in one country to a warehouse in a second country.
Right now. I've seen a lot of people and this ranges from like very very serious sort of you know, news sources and economists trying to sort of just directly model what the price increases are going to be have since people be like, oh, your shirts are going to cost sixty percent more, or physical video games will stop existing because they're too expensive, and who gives a shit? Why are we even trying to do sectoral modeling of
the impacts of this. If you try to impose a sixty to one hundred percent tariff on goods from China and a twenty percent tariff on all goes into the country, the economy will collapse. I don't know why everyone is pretending that this won't fucking happen. We're going to get into it a second. I guess the reason why people are pretending this is happening because the way they're doing the modeling kind of assumes that it won't, which is baffling,
incomp handsible nonsense. Well, and that's especially amusing because the seemingly biggest issue this year around politics has been inflation,
which has impacted every country around the globe. The US is actually whether it decently well, although there's been a catastrophic failure in communicating that and listening to the actual complaints from people on how they're still struggling with rising inflation, but still a big reason why Trump was elected is because he simply is not Joe Biden, and he's not from the Biden Harris administration, and there's this perception that he will be able to fix the economy, he will
be able to get around inflation lower prices, when seemingly his main economic proposal will lead to what's probably going to be an economic collapse if it happens in the brutality of which he proposes. And there's another element of this, right when I say that the likely result of Trump actually trying to implement his tariff policy is a global economic collapse, there's another part of this that everyone seems to have forgotten. And I don't know why they've forgotten this.
I guess it's because nobody he actually reads any of the things that Trump puts out on his website.
Which is true. No one actually reads that stuff. It's nuts, especially his own supporters. Yeah, a majority of his own supporters do not pay attention to like Daily News.
Yes, and now I remember this because I did an episode about these tariffs, like like six months ago, and one of the things about this, he has a thing called Agenda forty seven, right, which is his agenda for what he's going to do when he takes.
Power, which no one has cared about. And now everyone is going through and posting policy proposals from like fucking two years ago with the headline breaking news Trump announces new plan, Like, no, he hasn't. This is our old plans. This stuff is like two years old. He's been openly
talking about all that. Yeah, frages, And one of the important parts of this, I'm just gonna read this quote because it is a part of this has been ignored by every single fucking analysis I've seen, from like fucking the Center for American Progress, who obviously we're gonna screw this up, to like Stamford's labs, Like everyone who's been writing about this has just ignored this part, which is quote as one of his top economic priorities, President Trump
will stop the flow of American jobs overseas by passing the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act. Under the landmark legislation, if any foreign country imposes a tariff on American made goods that is higher than the tariff imposed by the US, President Trump will have the authority to impose a reciprocal tariff on that country's goods. Okay, So what this would do again is that any country that has a tariff
already or imposes a tariff. And this is important if we get into a trade war where countries start imposing tariffs on each other in retaliation for their other terrorists, which is what happens when he did this trade war with China in like twenty eighteen twenty nineteen. That means that we're also going to impose a tariff, which means that the tariff rates don't stay at ten to twenty percent, they cyclically spiral upwards. That's just like an escalating series of terroriffs.
Yeah, and the thing is right, the policy process that they have on his page are like, well, okay, we're going to do this, do like a presidential Act, right, But the thing is the president actually has really, really, under a number of different acts, has extremely wide discretionary authority to set tariffs as long as he can basically sort of like cobble together.
There's some kind of bullshit excuse.
For it, and at that point you're lying on the Supreme Court to stop literally anything that Trump does, Like I don't give a shit, Well, I mean I don't know, maybe someone will like go up to like can Clarence Thomas and go like, hey, if we do this like importing new like windshield wipers for your RV is gonna cost ten million dollars more or whatever. But like there's there's no shot of this stuff getting stuff. And the thing is right, the reciprocal tariff stuff. He could just
do this through his existing Terriforf authority. He doesn't actually even need to pass upthing through Congress. Who's actually be I think tricky for him, but he doesn't need to do You.
Know what we need to do right now, Tomia just badly, badly cut to a bunch of companies that are going to be absolutely fucking eviscerated if this goes through. That's right, Donald Trump stands for anti capitalist action. He's going to destroy free trade. So enjoy these ads when you still can. Okay,
we are back Miah. Let's hear how Trump is going to perfect the capitalist economic system by a series of escalating tariffs that will destroy the economy and in doing so, but about in the opportunity for Marxist to size power and change the world economic system. Yeah, so I'm going to read another quote from that same agenda forty seven thing. Quote.
For example, food items like cereals, your other preparatory goods are tariffed at thirty two point nine percent by India and nineteen point five percent by China and only three point one percent by the US. India applies a tariff of twenty five point three percent on transportation equipment, while the US only terrorists goes at two point nine percent. Now, those exact numbers are debatable, but it doesn't matter because these these are going to be vibes based ones, based
on how pissed off Trump is at a country. Yeah, as Trump is usually a vibes based guy. Yeah, especially when it comes to the economy, especially when it comes to like these numbers he's pulling out like between sixty to one hundred percent. He doesn't know what any of those numbers means. He's just thinking of a number and saying it out loud.
And the thing about all of these things, right, even just the base twenty percent, or let's let's go to the lowest numbers he's talked about, which is a ten percent tariff on all goods and a sixty percent tariff on Chinese goods. Right, that in and of itself blows a smoking crater in the world economy. And none of the assessments that you will read are talking about this.
One of the things that they will mention that is true, but they're not, you know, getting to the importance of is that this affects stuff that's made in the US. Because the thing about things that are made in the US is that they're made from components that are from elsewhere, because that's how international supply chains work.
Oh wait, even though we have, through tariffs, moved all manufacturing of Toyota into the United States, you're saying that still some of the materials are not all solely made him produced within the country, and it actually requires unfeign trade. Yeah, and part of the problem I think of, like, Okay, so if you logically think out the conclusions of what that means, right, Okay, first mistake, Abia that you're trying to solve this problem through.
Well, but here's the thing, right, Obviously Trump is not going to think through this, right, But I kind of expect people who are like writing about this for a living to do mildly better than this.
And possibly some of the people that he like hires onto his cabinet and team. Maybe, but we'll.
Say, you know, I'm not talking about like his critics. Oh sure, sure, one of the numbers will see all the time. The Center for American Progress has this line of how the terrofts will function as a tax that costs the America you conceive for like seventeen hundred dollars a year.
Right, which was the line that Kamala used pretty often. Yeah, framing his tariffs as like a sales tax.
This is fucking horseshit. The only way you can think that the net effect of this would just be a seventeen hundred dollars tax is if you don't understand how the economy works at all. Right, So I went there and read this, and the way that they model it is just by like they find the like net dollar value of imported goods and then apply a tax to it, and then try to figure out like how much of those goods that the average person would buy in a year,
and then increase the price. But and this is something that's very at the end of the analysis, right right at the very end, there's little section where they say that they assume this would have no other effects on the economy. This is unbelievably fucking stupid. I can I emphasize enough?
Can you explain why that doesn't make any sense? So? Okay, So here's the thing.
Right, prices go up, now people can buy less things. What does that do to the economy, Well, it slows its growth rate. Right, companies start to go out of business. And we're gonna get me into more of the ways that this plays out in a second. Right, But a bunch of a bunch of people in a bunch of places fucking lose their jobs because suddenly the reduction and consumer demand means that there's a fucking reduction necessary production.
And this has cyclical effects throughout the entire economy as more and more people fucking lose their jobs.
And also, you know the thing, the thing about those people who lose their jobs is that that also fucking reduces demand because those people are now even less able to afford the stuff that's been increased by inflation prices, and this this spirals through the entire world economy. In order to.
Understand what exactly this is going to do, I think we need to understand why, you know, because like if Kamala Harris, I don't know if it makes any difference in the election. But Kamala Harris walks of the stage and says this is going to cost you seventeen hundred dollars. She does not walk on the stage and say this
is going to cause an economic collapse, right. And I think the reason that happened is because we've gotten into this place where nobody fucking understands how the economy works at all, in a way that's even worse than it was even in like the twenty tens. Like in the twenty tens, I think people sort of had a vague understanding. The thing that was happening to the economy was uberization,
whatever you call it, was the expansion of gig work. Right, There was sort of an understanding and a focus on the very sort of low level parts of the economy, like what are you a poor person doing for your job?
Right? Does how does your income work?
And not purely on these sort of like high finance or in the case in the case of what's been happening here, everyone has been unbelievably completely focused on like the Chips Act and like state led industrialization and all that stuff is fucking bullshit. It's it basically hasn't done anything yet, it's not going to do anything for like a decade, and it's not mostly what's going on in
the economy. I've been holding my tongue on this for years, but the people who have been writing about the economy don't understand how the fuck it works because they've been completely myopically obsessed with the idea that we're in this new era of state capitalism and no like the actual thing that's been happening in the economy. And I think if you are like a person who buys stuff, you
probably understand this. But for some reason this has never made it to like economists or like people who fucking write about the economy for a living. Is consumer to
manufacturer sales. So this is stuff like Temu. This is stuff like san who she I mean invented It's a strong word, but they're one of the first people who sort of popularized this model, right, And this is the thing where you have a platform that lets people like nominally buy directly from the factories or from you know, the people who are producing fruit, right, And these factories aren't producing goods until basically either people order the goods
or like analytics tells them to order it, so they don't have a lot of the problems that other kind of like distribution bottels have. For you have a bunch of good sitting in a warehouse, like, you just don't have that because you don't start production until your sort of orders.
Come in, your analytics come in. And the theory here is you can reduce costs by eliminating the middleman. But of course a new kind of middleman emerged, and that is the drop shipper god. So the drop shipper is just someone using the consumer to manufacturer pipeline right the platforms that are supposed to let you the consumer sort of just like buy directly from the thing and cut out milmen. It's just someone doing that but then turning around and selling you the result. And this has become
just utterly fucking ubiquitous in the American economy. It's sort of like an integral part of the American scam economy now too, as the American economy has been increasingly sort of riddled and consumed by scams and riddled and consumed by sort of like people trying to capitalize on like some fucking meme or some political thing.
You know, you have all these people doing like drop ship t shirts right where they can immediately come in and sell all of this stuff.
These like short lived like trend meme based either like fashion or even like goods. You know, you can talk about like the amount of like content creator merch that is all funneled through these like drop shipping companies.
Yeah, and it's also what's been It's a thing that's enabled like fast fashion to function.
In the way that it is right now, right absolutely.
And this has become what consumption is in large swaths of the world is from this sort of like direct to consumer drop shipping shit, right.
Yeah.
Now, the thing about about these drop shipping things is that their profit margins are really really low. They don't make that much money, and in fact, a lot of these things like hemorrhage money until they've basically you know, they do the thing that Amazon did, right, where like you lose money for a million years, but then eventually you have enough market chourney you start making money again.
Yeah, because you make it so all your competitors basically can't function because you have prices that are so low. And then when you're the only one in the game with a sizeable power influence, you can raise prices and then you make tons of money. Also the Uber model, although Uber still is improfitable. Yeah well so yeah, Uber will never make any money. Right.
But the other thing here that's important is that, you know, so the margins of a company like Temu, right, which is like probably the biggest of these sort of companies.
Now, are low. But Tamu technically has tech money, Like they have money to back them up. Right, you know, who doesn't have an unbelievable amount of just like capital sitting around that they could just instantly pull from if suddenly there is I don't know, a sixty percent fucking price shock. Oh wait, it's all of the fucking manufacturing you know, like tiny manufacturing firms that these drop shipping things use to produce all their stuff. Right.
That infrastructure is very fragile. It's it's margins are very bad. And oh guess what happens to that shit if you impose sixty percent terraces on it?
Right, it just shuts down because that's the easiest option, right.
Yeah, And you know, and presumably I think one of the other parts of this would be part of the reason that this has been happening is that all of this office are being imported like under terriff loopholes, but like that loopholes not hard to close, right.
What terraf loopholes are you referring to? Oh yeah, so I talked about this the ten we episod. So those loopholes on American teriffs were like, if you're bringing stuff into the country that's below a certain value, it has to be above like a six hundred dollars something to like trigger a threshold to like activate the teriffs applying to it. So people just ship a bunch of like one billion boxes individually that are like five hundred and
ninety nine dollars to go under the thing. So you're saying, I can still maybe buy my new Sonic the Hedgehog PS five game though, that should be fine. I'll be totally good. Oh god, okay.
So the other part of this that's important, right, So this is the kind of I don't know if news the right word, but this is the kind of recent part of the economy that's incredibly dependent on Chinese supply chains, right,
that gets just liquefied if these terrorifts go through. These are enormous companies that you know are going to just eat shit and those companies eating shit have the sort of effects we talked about earlier, right, which is it caused people to get fired, it causes growth collapses, it causes cyclical decreases in people's ability to buy thing, and then also like demand decreases because people can't buy things.
But this is like the new school supply chain stuff. Right.
Temu's a product of really the last six or seven years, and it really only functions the way it does now in last about four but the previous two eras supply and logistics, right, which is sort of Walmart and Amazon are both also almost completely dependent or Chinese supply chains.
Right.
Yeah, there's a good JD super article which is they're like a business intelligence website, right. You know, it talks about how Walmart imports seventy percent of all of it's goods from China.
Yeah, that tracks seventy percent seven zero, right. And the reason that it works like this is because Walmart's entire business model, all of their supply chains, all of their logistics, everything that they do, right, was designed basically hand in hand to be integrated into Chinese economic production. And you can't just move that shit instantly. Right.
And this is also true, something like Amazon right, where Amazon like sixty three percent of independent sellers on Amazon this is from the same source are Chinese. Right, So what you're dealing with is vast parts of the American economy, right, the parts of the American economy that you interface to buy things are based on goods that are suddenly going to have like sixty to one hundred percent tariff stapled
onto them. Now, the thing that people have been talking about as the like, oh well, here's the thing that will happen instead instead like instead of the thing that's pretty obviously going to happen if this happens, which is just the decount of bubble we're in pops and everything starts to go to shit, people have been like, oh, well, this will just accelerate the shift of production of goods
out from China. And like I've been talking about this for like a fucking decade, right, Like the journal Chwung is something that I talk about a lot that I record. People really has been talking about this for literally ages and ages and ages. So people have been trying to move production out of China for ages. I mean, like one of the first big attempts to do this was in twenty eleven when there is there's a series of riots in China and people tried to move production of
goods out of and they couldn't do it. And the reason that they couldn't do it was because you have to find a country that has both like a relatively skilled and educated labor force and also has the infrastructure to be able to like match Chinese production. And so I mean they we're talking about things like they have to have like a functioning electrical grid that is stable enough.
For production to function.
And this rules out an enormous number of countries and it's it's just really really hard. And yeah, like Chinese capital has been moving away from its sort of old centers and the prop of delta to.
Places like Vietnam.
Right, But and this is the fucking big one, right, A lot of a lot of what's been happening for the people have been talking about this thing called quote quote unquote decoupling, which is which is the separation of the US and Chinese economy so that they're not like they're trying with each other. People think this is good for ideological reasons, or they think it's just something that's happening, and it's not it's not happening. You know what else
isn't happening. It's us not plugging these products and services.
I think we do legally have to plug them. So here they are. Here's the plugs for the products end services.
All right, now that you've decoupled yourself from your money to buy these products and services, let's let's talk a little bit more about why decoupling is fucking bullshit. One, and I've been to something I've been saying on the show for years, like people have this sort of fantasy that what's happening is that, Okay, instead of making your thing in China, you make your thing somewhere else. And this means that American companies no longer have the supply
change running through China. That's not what's happening at all. On the financial front, what you have is actually increasing integration as China attempts to sort of like you know, has been lifting restrictions on the ownership of different types of corporations to make it easier for foreign owners to actually come in and invest and put capital in China.
Right.
The second thing that's happening is a lot of these supposedly like we're cutting China out of the supply chain. Things have been a bunch of Chinese companies starts starting
to set up production in Mexico. Now, the thing about that, right, if Mexico was supposed to be the fucking panacea forgetting it out of these tariffs, remember that Trump was talking about two hundred percent tariffs on Mexico, and that's the country that's supposed to like fucking get us out of this mess by like, Oh, we'll be fine because like production will just shift away from China to like to where like a lot of a lot of the assumptions I was reading was like people were talking about, oh,
the production will like twenty five percent of production will like.
Shift to Canada. It's like, no, it won't.
Just Canada doesn't have the fucking production facilities to do They're like, what are you talking about, Like.
Canada doesn't have the population to do that. No, it doesn't. This is this sort of problem, right, you know.
On the one hand, you know, China has been de industrializing for like a decade and a half now, right and kind of slowly, but there's the percentage of the population that's working in manufacturing has been steadily decreasing for years and years and years and years. But the problem is that when you move production out of a place, you actually have to have a second place to produce it, and there just haven't been right like you, it's it's
pretty easy to move low end manufacturing. This is what's been happening, right, Like really cheap garment stuff, for example, has been has a moving to places like.
Bangald in Vietnam for a while. But once you start getting into the stuff that China produces like the most of right, which is things like fucking cell phones, sort of mid tier commodity production that gets way way, way, way way harder. No, but the Chips Act will save us. Me. I heard it from everyone on the television. I just got this.
This is the sort of thing about this, right is if you look, if you read the analysis that people are doing of this, they just sort of assume that you can just like, oh well, like naturally a bunch of the consumption that Americans are doing will stay the same because they'll go buy goods that aren't produced in China. It's like, okay, like where where are you finding these
goods from? Like what production facilities are you? Just like suddenly that have just been like sitting there fallow are just suddenly gonna like a peer out of nowhere, And the answer is like, that's not gonna happen, And it's not. It's not going to happen, partially because they don't exist. Partially because again, the immediate consequence of this is a massive economic labs. China's economy has already been slowing for the like basically, I mean it's been slowing.
Since like two thousand and eight. Really wow, I see.
That's an eleven kind of but it's especially been slowing in the past two or three years because of sort of cover restriction stuff and also just a kind of lackluster rate of returns on their own like they had their own version of the two thousand and eight housing bubble and that's annihilated and an unbelievable amount of money because it turns out investing in real estate doesn't work
as his basis for your economy. But like that's the thing, right, If the Chinese economy fucking goes down, right, that's like that's seventeen percent of the world's GDP. Seventeen yeah, of the total GDP, right, And it's like the economy isn't national in a way where you can have an economic collapse in another country, in just a country that's that large and ignore it. And the thing I want to close on, and the reason we know that this is true is that it is actually possible kind of to
restart america domestic manufacturing, right. Reagan was able to do it in the eighties. And Reagan did it through this thing called the Plaza Accords where he basically he didn't literally put the prime ministers of Japan and West Germany at gunpoint, but he basically put them at gunpoint and force them to increase the value of their currencies so that the US currency would devalue, which would admit which
makes it like a more competitive export economy. And this actually brought back American manufacturing for a while until it had to all be reversed under the Clinton administration and the reverse Plaza Accords, because the problem was when you sort of nuked the zero sum manufacturing of a country
like Japan, their fucking economy didn't work anymore. And in order to sort of bail out the Japanese economy and stop just a sort of world running economic collapse, it would have just like tore the absolute shit out of the economy. The US had to fucking reincrease the value of its currency and lose its whole domestic production base.
Right. You can't actually increase a production base in the world right now without decreasing it somewhere else, and that has sort of staggering ripple economic effects for the entire global economy, which is why even if Trump's plan worked somehow and didn't immediately cause an economic collapse by like the direct effect on American consumers, it would cause another economic collapse by the effect on fucking people in China.
So well, Mia, I think you might be overreacting here a little bit, because at least food will be available, obviously, and I learned this on X My main source for news is that agriculture almost all done in the States, so we should be fine, Like, we'll still be able to eat food, right, I say, staring.
No to the voice, No, you can't, because, unfortunately, think about American agricultures. It's all fucking mechanized agriculture. The thing about mechanized agriculture is that you need the mechanized part, and that's all fucking produced either in other countries or the John Deere fucking like, tractor factories in the US are all unbelievably reliant on a bunch of parts that are made overseas.
So also, we do import a great deal of food, well we do. Yeah, even just talking about the food that we produce here, right, Like, that's also gonna be fun. I wonder, I wonder where your strawberries in November are coming from. I think the other thing to keep in mind here is that this is only one aspect of
how Trump will impact the economy. Obviously, his immigration policies could serve a similarly large financial problem if a whole bunch of agricultural jobs suddenly kind of vanish, and farms and other processing plants just to go out of business due to a lack of workers. And even some people on Trump's team have started to acknowledge this, mostly Elon Musk, who has openly said that Trump's term will involve some
quote temporary hardship, so between tariffs and mass deportations. Like, even people on his team know that this is going to damage the economy, especially in the short term, if not the like forever term. Yeah, and yet he was still elected as the economically viable candidate.
Yeah, and I think the last part we should say, and this is it's not that you can't like fucking obliterate a giant portion of the American economy is still come out extremely popular because because you've crushed the American working class like that, that's what Reagan did, right, Like Reagan and the Vulgar Shocks did this enormous. I mean, just put a crater in the American economy in Reagan's first term, Like there's skyrocketing unemployment, just like real, real
sort of economic devastation. But the thing about the Vulgar Shock was that the way he blew up the economy was really really good for people who like fucking owned assets, like people who like owned bonds, like people like people who held other people's debt. He was great for those people.
And like the burgeoning investment economy which now kind of dominates our entire economic system. Yeah, and it was incredible for those people. And so it was fine.
But the think about this economic collapse that this is also going to just absolutely fuck up the days of a bunch of extremely wealthy and influential capitalists. So including by the way, Elon Musk, who's Tesla's are produced.
In China, like he has a gigafactory. He's a gigafactory in shing John. So we'll see if Trump actually is able to implement this stuff. I think he able to on a policy level. It's just politically, can he actually do these tariffs? Yeah, it's it's it's unclear. It's also unclear what exact numbers he's gonna run with. A ten percent tariff will still be bad, but it's nothing compared to one hundred percent tariff. I think Trump by and large just says whatever comes into his head without thinking
through the actual logistical ends of what he's saying. And I think most Trump's supporters do not take him literally as a person, at least they don't take what he says necessarily literally all the time. They take him seriously, but perhaps not literally.
Yeah, so we'll have to see how this actually plays out. If it does play out in the ways that Trump has said that it is going to play out, it is going to just unbelievably tank the economy in ways that absolutely suck. So, yeah, that's that's happening here in the future. Maybe that's the name of the podcast, right.
So stock up on your PS fives now. Before they get harder to buy, and it'll be fine, Yeah, they'll be There'll be nothing bad that happens to the economy as long as you have your PS fives. Yeah.
People always want fucking books to the end of episodes, so I'm just putting books at the end of episodes. This is my plugging Chwang Chua Andng. We'll help, We'll put it in the description. It's a bunch of stuff about Chinese economics. Mostly it's a sort of economic history of visionally the socialist period and the transition to capitalism. But it also has a bunch of very very good stuff.
I'm trying to understand the Chinese economy. And so if you want to be about ten years ahead of like guys you write for the economists, if you read Chwang, you will end up being like ten years ahead of those guys.
So yeah, great stuff.
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