32 posts from Thursday, May 8, 2025

A few moments ago, we learned that Treasury Secretary Scott Besson and U.S. trade rep Jameson Greer are both heading to Switzerland this week to meet with China's lead representative on trade and economic matters. And the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson just wandered into the studio, just was in the building for some reason, exclusively to tell us more about what Wall Street has been waiting for. Mr. Secretary, thank you for joining us. Now, earlier today, you said that we hadn't had negotiations with China. Now you're two days away from getting on a plane, and I know you've been working around the clock, but what changed? What was the catalyst for this? Well, Laura, we haven't had negotiations. And first, thanks for having me on the show. The world has been coming to the U.S., and China has been the missing piece. I was going to be in Switzerland to negotiate with the Swiss. Turns out the Chinese team is traveling through Europe, and they will be in Switzerland also. So we will meet on Saturday and Sunday. And look, we have shared interest that this isn't sustainable, as I said before, especially on the Chinese side. And 145 percent, 125 percent is the equivalent of an embargo. We don't want to decouple. What we want is fair trade. But who made the first call, like in a dating world? Who makes the first call here today? There are lots of calls, Laura, is that there isn't a first call. There are a lot of contact points over time. All right. China typically loves a long, drawn-out process, as we knew in previous trade negotiations. How do you get them in this situation, without revealing too much, to move at the speed that we know President Trump wants to operate at with this deal, which I imagine will be fairly large? Well, I think that this is what we're going to do in Switzerland, is we've agreed to talk. Then on Saturday and Sunday, we will agree what we're going to talk about. My sense is that this will be about de-escalation, not about the big trade deal. But we've got to de-escalate before we can move forward. Well, they said that they would not talk unless the reciprocal trade tariff of 145 percent was removed. Would it be likely that you would be able to go back to the president and say, to show good faith, we could drop this down in the interim to 50 percent? Could that be in the cards? Laura, you know, I'm not going to negotiate. You're on TV. You're one of the most popular anchors in the world, so I'm not going to give away our strategy. And, look, everything's on the table. It's up to the president at the end of the day. The president has said that he's happy just to give all countries a number if the negotiations don't go well. And that's what we're doing with the other 17 important trading partners, is, look, you can negotiate in good faith, you can come with your A game, or President Trump is happy to ratchet the number back up to your April 2nd number. If you don't want to decrease your tariffs, your non-tariff trade barriers, the currency manipulation and subsidies of labor and industry. Dumping products in the United States, which we know they do as well. One of the things he loves to do, and this is what I like about how President Trump negotiates, he likes to keep everybody guessing until the last possible minute here. And so in this case, I mean, China, again, they said they're not going to talk unless that 145 percent is off the table, at least temporarily. President Trump has also said, if it turns out we don't have a deal, that's OK. He's fine with no deal. So I like that personally. I think it's great and brilliant. But Wall Street, your old friends hate it. They hate that kind of uncertainty. What do you say to them tonight, given President Trump's comments about, well, we don't have a deal? We don't have a deal. We'll survive. Well, Laura, in game theory, it's called strategic uncertainty, what you're talking about. Nobody does it better than President Trump, and it can be unsettling for the markets. But why why are they unsettled because they have a lack of information? I have President Trump has asymmetric information for what he's willing to do. We don't disclose it. And again, with President Trump, that the strategic uncertainty will make sure that we get the best deal possible. That's what's happening with the trading partners who are coming to us. China, they're they're barges coming toward the West Coast now. Lots of reports today, including on CNN, about the looming barge being barges being half empty. Let's watch. We have a we have a question from a reporter to a commentator on this. We'll get it for you in a moment. But it was basically fear mongering that Christmas time is coming. There's going to be no toys for children. Trump is Grinch. And you all are going to get blamed for this. Was the political pressure and the consumer pressure building to an extent that critics are saying forced your hand again, Laura, that I think a lot of American businesses have prepositioned a lot of inventory, the trade deficit actually jumped because so many people bought in advance. And the companies that I've talked to have done that. So we are going to stick to our guns. But again, the U.S. and China have shared interests. They are the deficit country, though. They sell us about four times more than we sell them. So it would be felt harder in China. But we don't want a decoupling. We don't want a decoupling. Why wouldn't I want to play devil's advocate on that? Why wouldn't we want to decouple from China? We didn't trade with the Soviet Union. That ended up pretty well. It turned out pretty well. They hungered for our goods and and desperately wanted what we had. And we didn't give it to them. Since China is our geopolitical adversary and they have so much power over us because of their industrial base, they make a lot of ships now. We don't make as much at all as President Trump said. So why wouldn't this be a time to decouple? Well, Laura, let's split that into two pieces. So we don't want to decouple over textiles and things like that. What we do want to decouple over is exactly what you said. We want to decouple over strategic industries. And as I said before, the only good thing about COVID was it was a beta test if we were ever cut off from the strategic industries. And President Trump has told the entire trade team this cannot happen again. So whether it's steel, semiconductors, medicines, things like that, we are going to build it here. So we're going to bring back strategic manufacturing. We're going to bring back precision manufacturing, clothing, sneakers. Those aren't essential goods that affect our national security. Well, they don't affect our national security. And there are things that we can make here in those categories, very high end things. But in terms of mass production, then they can have at it. I listened to Paul Tudor Jones when he's interviewed on television. He's a really smart investor. He had an interesting exchange about where things stand to watch. You have Trump who's locked in on tariffs. You had the Fed who's locked in on not cutting rates. That's not good. That's not good for the stock market. We'll probably go down to new lows even when Trump dials back China to 50 percent. And that's what you're expecting. Oh, I'm sure he'll dial it back to 50 at some time. I mean, I think that's kind of in the market right now. Very response to him. Look, I've known Paul a long time, he's a fantastic investor. I think as long as I've known him, he'd been mostly bearish and very good at predicting the bearish outcome. But what we are seeing with the trade deals that we're doing, I think trade frictions can go down, that Americans can get a fairer deal. And the other thing we're seeing is through President Trump's leadership, the world is renegotiating trade. The U.K. and India just struck a trade deal today where a lot of tariffs and barriers came down. So President Trump has pushed other countries to do things between each other. Some companies are just saying we're never coming back to the United States. Mattel, big toy company, hasn't been operating here for some years. Watch. If the tariffs come and they stay, would it be cheaper to manufacture toys in the United States? We don't see that happening. We believe that production in other countries is the best balance between manufacturing in international, outside of the U.S., and continue to develop product in America. Well, I remember we had toys that were made in the United States when you and I were growing up. We somehow had toys around the Christmas tree. We weren't all that deprived, and we had a pretty good Christmas. But what of that? Well, a couple of things. There are plenty of other countries that make toys. I believe Barbie is actually made in Indonesia, and Indonesia has come with very strong trade deals, tariffs, and non-tariff trade barriers that they're willing to take off. And look, the other thing, too, is this reporter behind me was quite snarky the other day when President Trump talked about the girl having two dolls, and he said, "Well, President didn't take the question," but he said, "What would you tell that girl?" I said, "I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents, that you and your family, thanks to President Trump, can now be confident again that you will have a better life than your parents," which working-class Americans had abandoned that idea. "Your family will own a home. You will be able to advance. You will have a good education. You will have economic freedom. That's what we are advancing." The press on this has been so predictably bad, and I think they ultimately know that what Trump is trying to do is try to just reorient things and reset things. But no one wants what Trump is doing except the MAGA crowd, the reset crowd. Wall Street doesn't want to do this. They would be happy to roll the dice with the status quo. Is that not the case? But Trump has the courage to do this. No other president was going to touch it, period, end of story. Well, Laura, no one has, and that's how we've gotten here. When President Trump says he doesn't blame the other countries for taking advantage of us, he blames the previous presidents at the Resolute Desk, I agree with him, because when these countries come with these good deals, look, this is a great deal, how do we get here? How do we get here? And the other thing, too, is we've created this barbell economy, so of course the status quo has done well. So the status quo is we have advanced finance, we have the tech sector that's the envy of the world. On the other side, we have a natural resources economy led by energy, which, by the way, the last administration tried to kill, and President Trump is filling in the arc in between with manufacturing jobs. You know, we're down to 8 percent manufacturing jobs in the U.S., and research has shown the best way to get the wage, real wage increases is in manufacturing jobs, not in the service sector. Mr. Secretary, thank you for joining us on a very big news night. I know you're going to be traveling all over not just to Switzerland in the coming weeks. Thank you very much. >> All right, and ahead.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.