WATCH: Jesse Watters Puts Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ In Perspective… With A Jab At Obama
Trump has unveiled his reciprocal tariffs and Jesse walks us through the implications
If you didn’t have time to catch all of Trump’s speech, Jesse will help you with the highlights.
Economics is all about understanding the behavior of crowd and their buying decisions.
Trump has spent his entire life with a laser focus on exactly that sort of question… now he’s elevating the principles he’s learned at the interpersonal and business-to-business levels and applying them to the interactions of nations.
Remember when Obama taunted Trump when he asked that question about what ‘magic wand’ Trump would wave to deliver all of his bold promises?
No surprise, but Trump obviously knew something about what a President can do that Barack didn’t. And now he’s putting it to work.
Trump is blazing a new path, drawing heavily on lessons learned during the Gilded Age of America. The reciprocal wrinkle leverages the desire other countries have of selling to the US market, pressuring other countries to reduce their own protectionist strategies in exchange for broad access to US markets.
If this works as he has envisioned it, he’s setting up a win-win scenario. Countries that want to play ball with us will lower their trade barriers and tariffs, letting both countries have the benefit of access to the markets. Customers will benefit.
Those who do NOT want to play ball will sell their products here at the same disadvantages that our products face there. That will do one of two things: it will either make them pressure their governments to rethink their trade barriers or it will create an opening where companies from elsewhere (maybe even here!) can out-compete.
Trump reminds us that there was a time before income tax when tariffs like this one helped build America’s Gilded Age.
He’s swinging for the fences in his belief that this same formula — with a few modern tweaks — will recapture that same magic and bring a nearly-bankrup America not only ‘back from the brink’ but open up a whole new Golden Age.
And no wonder: we’ve all seen enough of his buildings to know how he LOVES to dress up anything he touches with gold.
Will there be some hiccups as the market adjusts to new realities? Of course. That happens with EVERY kind of change. But Trump’s confident he’s got all the cards here, and he’s pushing in all his chips.
Time will tell if he’s right, or if there’s a wildcard out there that he didn’t account for. But for the moment, there’s a lot of optimism around this fresh new idea.
Especially now that a few countries — yes, we’re looking at YOU, Canada — have already blinked.
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