Speaker 1: And welcome to the podcast. How are you welcome on
this Wednesday? And today is the eleventh day of June,
Year of Our Lord, twenty twenty five. My name is
Tom Sullivan. So we start off, Yeah, we'll get all
up to date on what's going on with Los Angeles,
the China US deal, so to speak, some inflation report
coming out today. I want to start though with we
just got word just a little while ago that Brian Wilson,
one of the brothers, one of the founders of the
Beach Boys, passed away today at the age of eighty two.
Does that make that makes you feel old? So I'm
looking at the Beach Boys, and because podcast land there's
all kinds of restrictions about music and everything else. I
would love to play, you know, a little clips of
some of the Beach Boys' biggest hits. And I looked
at what are the biggest hits, and everybody's got a
different list. I mean, there's one here called you know,
wouldn't it be nice? They claim that's the biggest hit
of Good Vibrations Surfing USA. God only knows. Don't worry
baby Sloop John B. I mean, the list goes on
and on and on even the The Wall Street Journal
did a big oh bit on this say that he
was he was inspired by melodies of Chuck Berry. I
don't know about melodies. He's inspired by Chuck Berry and
the harmonies of the Four Freshmen and Phil Spector's Wall
of Sound style of production. And with all of that,
he and a couple of his brothers and a cousin
and a friend created the Beach Boys. So an era
yes continues to keep moving down the road. But let's
start today with speaking of southern California, and the Beach
Boys brought the SoCal sound, the California sound, not California Girls,
all that sort of stuff. Yep. But the the the protests,
they're not protests. They're there. I shouldn't use the word protest.
They're riots. And the people that are involved are professional agitators.
They're anarchists. They show up. The police know who they are.
They see them at any kind of these these sorts
of events. They're not an unknown. They come well prepared
and they come with good funding. If you've noticed, not
only does a lot do a lot of people have
the Mexican flags that just irritates people, But on top
of that, you also have identical professional printed signs, so
it's it's it's well done. And John Miller from r NYPD, guy,
I'll play a clip for you here in just a
second about the matching signs, and also he talks about
He says, of course they're they're paid. Yes, this is
this big money behind all of this. And there's various
groups they operate as nonprofits that are the ones that
are the people that organize and get all these people
out there. And there's a lot to it. He says,
there's you've got to bring you got to get everything
set up, You've got to bring the signs, you got
to bring water for the people to get them out there.
So there's a fair amount of cost on the part
of protesters. But one of the things I'll play it
in the clip. He talks about the fact that because
the police are using tear gas, that they now bring
leaf blowers to the protest on the streets. And you go,
what are they doing with leaf blowers on the streets
of Los Angeles? I mean, they may be a leaf
or two to clean up, but no, they do you
go to a protest with a leaf blower? No, you
go there because that's part of the equipment that you
have to blow the smoke back and the tear gas
back towards the police. So this is not These are
not just accidental people on the streets of LA. This
is highly highly prepared. And then on top of all
of that, the whole Newsom Trump fight back and forth.
I mean, on one hand, first of all, a lot
of this going back and forth is not going to happen.
Donald Trump is not going to arrest Gavin Newsom. Newsom
does the barfight thing about come and get me tough guy. Well, no,
he's not going to do that. But Newsom, I've said
this before. Five years ago, I would kind of bark
back at some of you about the fact that some
of you from California would call and talk about Newsom,
and I said, people don't know who you're talking about.
They do now. And a lot of this Gavin Newsom
is loving it because it gets him publicity and it
moves him up the chain for the Democrats who are
looking for somebody to fight back against Donald Trump, and
here you go, it's absolutely made for him. So Newsom,
who is skilled at self promotion, he's very good at
promoting himself. He is going to milk this for all
he can get at. Newsom threatened to withhold California tax
dollars from the federal government. That's not going to happen either.
The state, by the way, is not the one who
writes the checks. It's the taxpayer in California that write
the checks that it's called on their ten forty. So
Trump is actually helping Gavin Newsom, making him the Democrat
savior that will fight back against Trump. And yet on
the other hand, well, I mean, Donald Trump could just
sit back in Washington to let LA burn and then
point out how feckless the leadership is in California. But well,
there's also the accusation Donald Trump has overreacted by federalizing
the National Guard and the threat of sending in the Marines.
We haven't seen them yet. To keep talking about it
all of that, people go, I don't know about the
Marines on the streets of our cities against our own citizens.
So I don't know who you believe is overreacting. Trump
is getting a lot out of this too, because I mean,
he could have waited until LA was more damaged, more
people hurt, but nope, So Newsom is grabbing all the
headlines he can, and I believe Donald Trump is actually
helping Gavin Newsom. This may have backfired a little bit
on him, or maybe that's the whole plan, is to
get Newsom to be the guy to run against for
the Republicans in twenty twenty eight. And that's the other
part about this twenty twenty eight. It's awfully early. I
don't think Newsom, no matter what he gets out of this,
it will be sustained, other than people will probably know
his name better. At first, I thought Gavin Newsom and
Karen Bass looked rather weak. They didn't do anything. They
didn't respond. It's the same thing out of Tim Walls
in Minnesota when George Floyd, he didn't respond in Minneapolis
suffered billions of dollars of damage. And Gavin Newsom and
Karen Bass but basically all they did was say, now,
with the bad people that we don't know, we don't
support you, you people that are damaging property, you know,
would you please stop what you're doing? It made them,
I think, look rather weak. So Newsom is now crafting
his image, trying to play the victim in a story
like this. You need a victim, and you need a villain,
and he's trying to craft that he's the victim and
that big don Donald Trump, the mean president, is the
villain and all of this so Trump gets what he wants.
He has promised to be tough on crime, he promised
to be tough on immigration. The polls are showing large
support for him in this. I don't know how long
that will stay, though, If you keep watching police cars
burn on American city streets and now it's spreading to
other cities, how long this will go before people start
turning on the president or yet say wait a minute,
you overreacted. I don't know which way this is going
to go, but it's still somewhat early. But these are
professional anarchists that are out there and they're going to
try to turn the tables on Donald Trump to make
him look like he's overplaying his hand. One of the
things about Gavin Newso TikTok followers he had on June fourth,
six hundred and three thousand followers June fourth, a week ago.
He now has over one million TikTok followers. So he's
getting followers on TikTok. I don't know if that will
lead to him getting a nomination in twenty twenty eight
Ken he sustained it. He's the master itself promotion. The
problem is he starting to look kind of desperate. And
it's a long way to two thousand and eight eight
twenty twenty eight, and so far, we'll find out tomorrow.
He's filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump and the judge
has told them to just hold on. We're not going
to do any changes until tomorrow. There's a hearing and
we'll find out if But so far Newsom has not
been successful in corporating. Maybe tomorrow we'll have to wait
and see. Let's start with John Miller, former NYPD talking
about the protesters they're not protesters, the rioters, and what
they've been up to.
Speaker 2: You know, it's interesting because every day that they are
in contact with law enforcement, and some of these protesters
aren't people who just came out on the migrant issue.
These are experienced protesters involved in multiple issues. As they go,
they learn. So let's talk about what police have been
documenting in terms of what they've been facing from the protesters.
They've talked about what weapons have the protesters armed themselves with,
and over the course of the last four or five days,
what they've seen is blunt force weapons, metal pipes, baseball bats, explosives.
You saw a lot of that video right, commercial grade
fireworks being fired at police, and so far one molotov cocktail.
Speaker 1: A couple of nights ago.
Speaker 2: That individual charge now with attempted murder, bottles, rocks, bricks,
concrete blocks, and using their own chemical agents, deploying their
own pepper spray, smoke grenades. Really interesting. When the police
are going after people in the crowd who may have
thrown or sprayed something at them, they deploy smoke so
that the police can't see as they retreat. On the
other hand, they also have defensive measures as aside from that,
which is we've been seeing more gas masks being deployed,
face shields, goggles, gloves. They've even been using leaf flowers.
Think about that, when police are deploying gas leaf blowers
to blow the gas back in the other direction. Communicating
not on cell phones. They're operating with an assumption that
their phones may be being monitored, which I think is
a long shot. But they're using handheld encrypted radios, so
we're seeing that level of sophistication increase by the day.
Speaker 1: So they're not just pedestrians walking around. These are professional agitators.
And again we'll see if the mood changes are not.
So far, the president has got the public support. I mean,
they don't like the illegal immigration problem, they support the
president on that, and they certainly don't like crowds burning
police cars and damaging property. So all of that is
in favor of the president. And it's not helpful to
Gavin Newsom, even though he's trying to play the victim.
Why haven't you been Why didn't you jump on this
the minute it started started Friday night? So we'll see.
Harry Enton, the statistician from CNN, this is his update
on all of this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's just start off. If Gavin Newsom wanted to
take on Donald Trump and loves the attention, he has
one hundred percent.
Speaker 4: Gotte it.
Speaker 1: Take a look here.
Speaker 3: Google searches of Gavin Newsom with Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: Get this up.
Speaker 3: Nine thousand, seven hundred percent versus a week ago. More
folks are googling Gavin Newsom's name with Donald Trump than
ever before in Google searches dating all the way back
since two thousand and four. Donald Trump was able to
make a name for himself through the Apprentice through all
of his business adventures. He is now making a name
for Gavin Newsom, who seems more than willing to relish
in this fight.
Speaker 5: One of the numbers, how can you kind of gauge
why Newsom would see if we're taking this purely political,
why Newsom would see benefit in taking on Trumpy?
Speaker 3: Why is it that Gavin Newsom is more than willing
to take on Donald Trump? And you know, it's all
about twenty twenty eight, and it's all about where Democrats
want their candidates to be. Should Democrats oppose Donald Trump more?
Among Democrats? Look at this, eighty four percent, eighty four
percent of Democrats nationwide say they want Democrats to take
on Donald Trump more. This is not twenty seventeen anymore,
where the majority of Democrats want to compromise with Donald Trump. No,
they want a fighter with Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: And at this.
Speaker 3: Particular point, that is a big reason why Gavin Newsom,
in my opinion, at least politically speaking, is leaning into
this fight because he is thinking ahead to the future.
He's thinking ahead to twenty twenty eight and with a
vast majority. Look, you rarely get eighty four percent of
Democrats degree and anything except for the dislike of Donald Trump.
And that is what we see right now. They want
that opposition of Donald Trump, and that is why Gavin
Newsom seems to be more than willing to take.
Speaker 5: Him on in the wildly too early, likely, unreliable. Look
at where where things stand for the twenty twenty eight rays.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is so important to point out. Where is
this race right now the top chances to be the
twenty twenty eight nominee. Look, it's a clown car at
this particular point, all these candidates swished together. But she'll
notice that one name is ahead of the rest, and
that's Gavin Newsom at twelve percent. You see a Kasya Cortes, ten,
Buddha Judge ten, Shapiro six percent. But Gavin Newsom certainly
is up there right now in certain terms of the
candidates who are best composition to will get that twenty
twenty eight nomination. And he knows that the best way
to get this twenty twenty eight nomination is again to
oppose Donald Trump. That eighty four percent of Democrats who
want it, and at this particular point he's getting all
that attention, as we've see in them Google searches up
ninety seven hundred percent versus a week ago Newsom with
Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: So sadly, there is nothing anymore that is not related
to politics. I know this is twenty twenty five, twenty
twenty eight is three and a half years down the road,
but they are already trying to figure out who going
They're having trouble trying to find a Democrat leader, and
they want somebody that will fight against Donald Trump. But again,
if they try and make the race about vote for me,
because I'm not Trump, that failed with Hillary, that failed
with Biden, So they're gonna have to find something else.
And the other thing about Gavin Newsom that the people
of California know the rest of the country doesn't is
how badly he has managed the state of California. And
he's been a politician there for a long long time,
working his way up to governor. But the state is
financially upside down. They have the highest taxes in the nation,
they have the highest gasoline prices because of state taxes
in the nation. They've got homelessness that is beyond record setting.
It's just one giant mess under his leadership, and the
rest of the nation is going to find that out.
I think some of the other Democrats that Harry mentioned
probably will do much much better as the microscope starts
to focus in on the Democrat candidates who want to
be the next nominee. Tomorrow we get a hearing. The
lawsuit that Gavenusom filed against Donald Trump will be heard tomorrow,
at least a hearing. I don't know if we'll get
a decision, but so far, the judge said to Gavin Newsom,
just hold on. We're not going to stop the federal
government from going about what they want to do, so
we'll have a hearing on Thursday. Jonathan Turley, the Georgetown
law professor, weighs in, I.
Speaker 6: Think the important thing to remember is that the President's
going to win at the end of the day because
he has the authority and the resources to flood the
zone with federal officers. He could do it in a
number of ways, including the National Guard. He can even
use the Insurrection Act, which is many of these California
Democrats seem to be pushing him towards, which I don't understand.
There seems to be a perfectly valid reason for calming
the streets and getting security. You have a sheriff who
said he was overwhelmed. You have National Guard that have
been called out in other areas of the United States
to make sure that these riots do not get out
of control. Now, an issue with what's called Title ten
is that it starts with a statement that the president
has full authority to do this, and then it says
the governor shall issue that order. And what the Trump
administration is arguing is, look, that's a mandatory requirement. We
can federalize the National Guard and you are to cooperate.
Newsham is saying, no, we both have to sign off
on it. The Court's going to have to decide. But
this is going to happen. I mean, Trump has made
very clear. President Trump has made very clear that he
is going to do stabilized situation and flood the zone.
Speaker 1: Them don't even understand why the troops are there. They
think they're there to quell the riots.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's simply not true that they are being used
to guard largely two buildings. But also the rhetoric here,
of course, is going is getting out of control. You
had a Democratic member, I believe yesterday you said, look,
Ice has to simply retreat or these types of riots
will continue.
Speaker 4: Well, that's not going to happen. It's not exactly a.
Speaker 6: Useful argument to say you have to stop enforcing federal
immigration and then the riots will stop. It doesn't work
that way. The federal government has a right to enforce
federal immigration laws.
Speaker 4: They're going to do that.
Speaker 6: And the question is will local officials cooperate and also
whether the governor will cooperate to try to stabilize this situation.
But it's a non starter for Democratic members to say
retreat or else. There is an argument to be made here.
It depends how you read Title ten. But you know,
there's a lot of confusion about what happened before that.
President Trump just applied records that he didn't call, that
he did in fact call Nusham.
Speaker 4: Nusham made it very clear.
Speaker 6: On air that he was not going to approve the
use of the National Guard. The federal government has a
separate responsibility.
Speaker 4: They're not just pedestrians.
Speaker 6: They don't have to just stand there and watch as
another right occurs in Los Angeles. And this isn't hardly
the first time that has happened. And so the question
is when you act. And we saw in Minnesota with
Governor Waltz that he waited too long to issue the
order for the National Guard to go out there. He
waited until massive damages had occurred and many people were injured.
So this court's going to have a tough decision to
make going forward. No court likes to be in this position,
but generally the President of United States has this authority,
and more importantly, he most certainly can bring federal resources
into that city.
Speaker 1: Yes, that hearing is tomorrow. We'll find out if the
judge makes a ruling, and then one more for Wayne
in on all of this. Michael Schellenberger is an independent journalist.
He is an author. He's a professor at the University
of Austin serves as the chair of the Politics, Censorship
and Free Speech Department. He was the guy, one of
the two guys that Musk brought in after he bought
Twitter to go through the files to find out if
there was any shenanigans, and they found all of the
government censorship for conservative speech at Twitter. He was a
big environment he still is a big environmentalist. He was
active with Greenpeace. So he's been on the left side,
he's been on the right side. That's why he says
he's an independent journalist. This is his take on what's
going on in LA.
Speaker 7: I mean, look, I think the president is enforcing the law.
You know, this is not that different from when the
federal government moved to desegregate the South, and you had
many Southern states in the sixties that resisted those actions.
And you know, California is a pretty lawless place. I mean,
we don't enforce many laws against public camping. That's why
we have a homeless problem, open air drug dealing. You
have a governor in Gavin Newsom, who cided against legislation
ballot initiative that past last November with seventy percent support
to crack down on fentanyl drug dealing. Since then, the
governor has taken action to oppose enforcing that law. So
we don't really have that law enforced right now. And
you have a situation in LA where they've continually underfunded
the police. Most people don't realize Los Angeles has almost
half as many police officers per capita as New York City.
So you've already got a very lawless California. And I
think a lot of people are welcoming this kind of
strong action.
Speaker 1: And this is the clip from yesterday that we played
for you. Harry Enton over on CNN talking about the
support for the president.
Speaker 3: Immigrant citizens, immigrant voters form ball and voters have gone
tremendously to the right on this issue in twenty twenty
four and twenty twenty five versus where they were in
twenty twenty. That shift a forty point shift to the
right among immigrant voters. The group of voters who became
more hawkish on immigration were in fact immigrants themselves. Immigrants
were registered to vote in this country.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and we probably shouldn't be surprised that people that
are here legally, immigrants that are here legally went through
the difficulty of that process harbor a lot of anger
and resentment of the folks that came here illegally, you know.
I mean, I agree, I don't think there's any need
for the Marines, for example, national Guard should be sufficient.
But I think it's important to remember that the violence
broke out in Los Angeles before the National Guard had
been deployed. The governor had not called out the National
Guard soon enough. He also failed to call the National
Guards soon enough to deal with.
Speaker 8: The LA fires.
Speaker 7: These are folks that, as you know, your reporter mentioned before,
there actually have been in the business of funding these
very radical left groups. I mean, I think democrats outside
of California don't realize just how radical the Democrats in
California have been. I mean, they're openly you know, they
really did not want to condemn the violence and the protesters.
For a long time they insisted that there wasn't any
need for federal help when as we saw, people are
firing mortar fireworks at police officers, engage in all sorts
of violence. So, you know, I think that when the
dust settles, people are going to realize that we need
a significant, you know, increase of law enforcement in California
across the board, and certainly if the federal government is
going to do what President Trump was elected to do,
they're going to need that backup from the National Guard.
Speaker 1: It really does stem back to the days of COVID
and the defund the police movement after George Floyd. And
that's what California did. They defunded the police and they
are way understaffed, not only by normal metrics, but from
what they used to have in the past. When all
of a sudden done this basically is boiling down to
a political event. I know it didn't start that way.
But it certainly is there now, and so it's all
great for television. They have the riots, they have the
police cars, they have the police with their batons out.
But Kate Bettenfield is a long time Democrat spokeswomen, She's
very good at spinning for the Democrats, and listen to
her on this, she's basically calling out the fact that
this is Gavin Newsom trying to set up his future
well to make a run a nominee for the Democrats.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think he's using this moment to channel some
of the energy that they're a faction of the Democratic
base wants to see from Democratic leaders. I think this
is the kind of thing that people who feel frustrated
that the Democrats are not taking on Trump more directly,
this is exactly the kind of thing they want to
see now. I think the question here, though more broadly
for Democrats politically, is is this an effective message? I think,
at the end of the day, what is you know?
We know that the larger argument about Trump's lawlessness, about
abuse of power, it can resonate. I thought it was
very effective the way he called out Trump's hypocrisy around
protecting law enforcement in January sixth, but we also know
from the election that we just saw transpire in twenty
twenty four that this argument about democracy, it doesn't hold
the kind of urgency in people's lives across the country
that it does for some who are the kind of
most vocal, you know, champions the Democratic Party. And I
think Democrats have to reconcile that. So, you know, when
Gavin Newsom has an opportunity to command national attention as
he does right now and to take on Trump directly,
you know there is an opportunity there to go back
to the economy, to go back to what people across
the country are feeling in their day.
Speaker 4: To day lives.
Speaker 9: And I think that is that is the challenge from
a political messaging standpoint that Democrats have to reconcile here
and find a way forward on.
Speaker 1: And I don't know what Gavin Newsom is going to
do about some sort of that can gnomic speech because
he's been in charge of a disaster economically in California.
Speaking of the economy today, we got our inflation numbers
out for last month, and well it's it's not where
the Fed wants it to be, but inflation was up
one tenth of one percent so you can barely see that,
but that's a year over year two point four percent
above last year's prices. Take out food and energy, you
get to the core rate that was up two point
eight percent. So it's still not down to what the
Fed wants to be down to two percent flat. It's close,
but it means prices are still going up. They're just
going up at a slower rate than they were before.
The other part about this number is where is the
impact from the tariffs? And you have to get a
microscope out to find some of the prices that have
had big jumps. Let me pull up the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, say they're showing the big drop. What pulls
this number down is energy gas prices. Gas prices down
twelve percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics versus
a year ago. Energy services down eight percent. But then
you look at what's this line fifteen utilities. Do you
have a utility? Do you pay for gas, electric or whatever?
It might be up fifteen percent in the year over
year numbers. So some things are way up, some things
are way down, but overall, inflation isn't seeing the impact
of the tariffs yet. And I don't know. I presume
we will. I mean, there's seventy billion dollars worth of
tariffs collected and that money has to be passed on
to somebody somewhere, retailer, the customer. So it's everybody keeps
waiting in the economic world for the tariff impacts to hit,
and they may not. They haven't asked of yet to
any significance. And we'll see if they can work this
deal out to where we don't have these tariffs anywhere.
I would love to get rid of those. And speaking
of that, the big talks in London between the US
and China, Howard Lutnik was leading it as the Commerce Secretary.
They spent Monday all day. They spent well twenty hours
in total, twelve hours yesterday that the Chinese Vice Premier
and Howard Lutnik and the team. We're talking about the
agreement between the US and China, and when you look
at it, I'm not sure if there's a real deals.
The President put out a tweet on true social earlier
today saying that the deal is done, done deal, except
for it needs to be approved by the President himself
and by the President of China. I'm not so sure
it's much of a deal other than simply just a framework.
A guy who knows his stuff backwards and forwards, as
Derek scissors with the American Enterprise Institute, and that's all
he does. He's a senior guy over at the AI,
and that's what he follows, is about international trade. This
is his reaction to this announcement after twenty hours of
talks in London.
Speaker 8: Does a lot of double talk being issued?
Speaker 10: Now the President says it's a done deal, but it
has to be reviewed by who he's the president, and
I agree with you. We were told that we had
a deal at the Geneva Framework, we never saw paper
on that. Now again we have a deal reinforcing the
Geneva Framework, and apparently Secretary Latinik doesn't want to say
we're going to see any text showing what that deal
is either. It looks very much like this is a
temporary truce. The key event here is the Chinese saying.
Speaker 8: It's six months of magnet exports.
Speaker 10: That doesn't mean they're going to cut them off after
six months. It means that they're not committed to this
after six months, because they've already seen that the first
deal didn't even last a month, and I think that's
the way we have to understand it on the American side,
even though the administration is being.
Speaker 11: COI so who broke the original deal?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 11: This really jumped to our attention when all of a
sudden the automakers were saying, we're not getting access to
rare earth magnets and those supplies had fallen by half.
But that was in retaliation for what was it? The
simple fact that we put tariffs on the Chinese? Again,
this all came after the Geneva agreement, So why did
they decide to restrict were earth magnets all of a sudden.
Speaker 8: It's hard to know who broke the deal when there
really wasn't a deal.
Speaker 10: At some point, Secretary Vestend and President Trump were talking
about major Chinese reforms and instead we get a six
month moratorium on expar controls on magnets. I think what
happened was the Geneva deal was about terrafs, and we
got the tariff agreement and no one has broken it,
but neither side thought it restricted their other behaviors. So
the US has a lot of complaints about Chinese technology
theft and coercive acquisition. We move forward on some export controls,
and the Chinese said, oh, okay, you know new front
in our trade conflict.
Speaker 8: You have export controls. Now we have export controls.
Speaker 10: So I don't think export controls were covered at Geneva
and now they've had to add them.
Speaker 8: I don't say this lightly.
Speaker 10: Secretary Besson is out of his mind if he thinks
we're going to reshape the Chinese economy. I don't think
he actually thinks that. I think he would like it.
I think he thinks there would be advantages to China
for doing it. But I don't think he thinks Chi
Jinping is going to wake up after twelve years of
being you know, of of his culture, personality, dictatorship and
say oh, I've been doing the wrong thing on the
Chinese economy. So the US is going to have to
proceed in fits and starts changing our policy and seeing
what China's reaction is. That isn't very exciting. It's not
something you want to enow to the press or tweet
in all caps. But I think that's what we've seen.
We jacked up tariffs, They jacked up tariffs. We have
a higher tariff than we did in the first Rump administration,
So we moved changed our policy there. Now we're messing
with export controls, saying well, we're going to keep some
export control changes that we've made, we're going to drop others.
I think the US policy is incremental. I think that's
what it has to be. I think the idea that
we're going to get some big change in China is crazy.
Speaker 11: So that all that said, they have achieved correct me
if I'm wrong. Fifty five percent tariff right on China,
which a lot of people, going back to the campaign
trail and so forth, basically Forecaster said, you know, we
think tariffs will probablyettle around sixty percent, and at the
time that seemed extremely high.
Speaker 8: Now it seems low.
Speaker 11: Where where does a fifty five percent tariff if it's sticks,
which Latinix said is not going to change now, is
that enough itself to kind of prod the Chinese economy
in a different direction or in the US economy as well.
Speaker 10: No, the fifty five percent is the top line for
US goods. So the maximum tariff charge of fifty five
percent a USTR career, I think he US a forty
nine percent figure. That's the average tariff. There are a
bunch of exceptions in there. We could add more exceptions
and keep the fifty five percent top line rate.
Speaker 8: That is very much something that President Trump might be
minded to do.
Speaker 10: We have done very little to nothing public and maybe
being done privately on transshipment. So Chinese exports to India
and Ossian and a bunch of other countries are increasing,
and some of those goods are coming.
Speaker 8: To the United States.
Speaker 10: We have a higher tariff rate. It doesn't mean nothing.
It means something, but it is not nearly enough to
change the direction of Chinese policy.
Speaker 8: And I think when we tried to use tariff's.
Speaker 10: Alone, it didn't work. So I don't know that tariffs
will come down. We may get more exclusions. I do
know that China is going to remain the same kind
of poor partner that it has been.
Speaker 1: So essentially, there is an agreement to a framework. It's
kind of an agreement to agree to the agreement that
we had from Geneva a month ago that ever body
seems to have walked away from the only deal they have.
This is what the President said, is that we are
going to have continue to have fifty five percent tariff
on products coming from China. That's the ten percent universal
tariff plus twenty percent tariff for China sending fentanyl, and
then a twenty five percent tariff on steel and aluminum.
So fifty five percent is the max, but there's probably
more like ten or twenty percent numbers for most products.
The rare earth materials was the big deal. Automaker's jet
engines saying help China cut it all off, and they
were saying, we're running out of it. We can't make
cars or jet engines without that. So China has agreed
in this meeting in the last two days to a
six month moratorium well on producing the rare earth and
sending it to the United States. We have accused China
of stalling on those exports, and Trump officials have angered
the Beijing folks with new controls on chip design software,
and so that's been lifted where they're now going to
be able to China will be able to get some
high tech chips, plus they will get jet engines that
they've been asking for. Plus they will also get student
visas for Chinese students that we're going to agree. So
this is really about chips versus rare earth. Nothing else
is a big at those two topics, but basically, they
just agreed to the agreement that they made in Geneva
a month ago, both accusing each other renegging on it,
and now we wait to see if everybody will behave
and if we can reduce even these fifty five percent
tariffs and whatever they have on us thirty percent. I
think it is before we get these tariffs. I would
like to see them just absolutely gone, but that's not
going to happen anytime soon. So that's what we have
for today. When all was said and done, the market
today barely moved. The Dow was higher. It finished down
one point, the forty two thousand and eight sixty five,
the SMP down sixteen, the Nasdaq down ninety nine. Gold
went up twenty four dollars to thirty three sixty seven,
and oil pretty big boost there, three bucks higher, up
to sixty eight dollars now for one barrel of oil.
That's it for today. Thank you for coming by. We'll
try this again tomorrow. Hope to see you then,