Catherine Rampell
speaker
759 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Catherine Rampell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But it's really hard to lie about these things. I saw this great quote the other day from an economist at JP Morgan, of all places, who was saying that the thing about the stock market is Is that it can't be bullied, intimidated, deported, primaried in the next election or otherwise censored. Right. Like Trump has no power here to get it to to. you know, confess the outcome that he wants.
And it's like a real-time voting box, essentially. Sometimes it gets it wrong and sometimes it gets it right. But at least in real time, you know, Trump can't force it to do what he wants. And now we're getting real information out of the stock market, which is obviously contradictory to the happy talk we're hearing from the White House.
Yeah, I saw bits and pieces of this a few days ago, and I needed a special decoder ring to figure out what the origin of the crazy was. I feel this way with a lot of Trump-related talk, that he'll say something that's totally confusing, and then I end up spending way more time trying to figure out what his logic or intention was than he spent putting thought into what his proposal actually was.
I used to have a rule for myself. It's like, Don't spend more time thinking through the thing that Trump said than he did because it's like an exercise in frustration and futility. In this case, yeah, I think what people are proposing is, again, that if Trump tanks the stock market, then bond rates go down, right?
Which is what I was saying, like, very initially happened and normally what you would expect to happen because people sell their stocks, again, they put it into bonds, and then that pushes bond rates down. And then maybe...
because we're talking about government borrowing, when those interest rates go down, we can refinance the national debt, just like Donald Trump would refinance one of his properties, right? If you're a real estate investor or a homeowner, for that matter, and you're borrowed at a very high interest rate. You're excited when rates fall because you can refinance.
And so that maybe he could use that as an opportunity to not like negotiate our debt down, but just like when it rolls over, roll over it at lower rates or refinance otherwise. Anyway, I think that's the theory of the case. First of all, I don't think that's like nearly as plausible. Even if markets did what you would normally expect, right? which is, again, having interest rates fall.
I don't think that's remotely plausible. But again, we are seeing the opposite happen. Instead, we are seeing treasury rates increase, maybe because nobody wants to invest here, maybe because people want to hold cash, maybe because they're worried about inflation.
All the things that I was talking about before, you know, we don't know which of them it is, but whatever, we will soon probably, but whatever the cause is, the outcome means it becomes much more expensive for the federal government to borrow. And so, in fact, this will worsen our debt obligations in the United States. And they're already on a totally unsustainable path.
And nobody wants to do anything about it. If anything, Republicans on the Hill are trying to increase our debt through the coming tax cuts. Yeah. So whatever this kooky theory is not going to happen. Virtually the opposite is likely to.
A few thoughts on this. The AP reported today that, yes, foreign leaders have been calling the White House and no one is answering their calls. And also that they don't even know what to offer Trump. Right. They don't know what concessions he's demanding. And I think that's the problem here.
He does not know what concessions he is demanding or even if he wants concessions, because half of the time he's. he or his underlings say, no, no, no, this isn't for negotiation because we need the revenue, right? We need the tariff revenue to help pay for corporate tax cuts or other, you know, personal income tax cuts or what have you. Getting rid of capital gains, as you mentioned before.
So they need the revenue. They don't want to negotiate down the tariffs and or they want the tariffs to stay in place because that's the only way to encourage companies to move their manufacturing back to the U.S. Also a flawed premise for different reasons. But in any event, so sometimes they say it's permanent. Sometimes they say it's temporary.
If it is temporary, if they are negotiable, what is the end game? What is he trying to get out of it? And how do you negotiate with someone who does not know what they want? That is the fundamental problem right here. At one point, members of the administration had said, oh, the goal is to get other countries to lower their tariff rates.
So then, you know, they'll lower them and then we will lower them as well. And then we'll have freer trade. Right. That was one proposition for how this could go. Sounds nice. But the countries that have offered to have, in fact, 0% tariffs, I think Vietnam may have been one of them, they said, no, we don't want that. So it's like, what do you even give him?
And this comes back to what I was saying before, what we alluded to before, how do you find an off-ramp? When Trump announced what feels like years ago, but I guess was only a couple of months ago, tariffs on Canada and Mexico, he had some like fig leaf about how this was about immigration and fentanyl.
And it is true that with Mexico, at least, we do have a lot of people coming over the border without permission. We do have fentanyl coming over the border illegally. With Canada, neither of those things appears to be true. In fact, we send more fentanyl to Canada than they send to us, so it seems.
In any event, the solution, the Canada solution, I'm using air quotes for people who are only listening to this and not watching. The solution that Canada came up with was like, we're going to have a fentanyl czar. And also, even though there's not really a fentanyl problem.
Yes. I don't know.
The other concession, also in scare quotes, that Canada made was we're going to invest more money in border protection, except they had already announced the same amount of money back in, I want to say, December, December or November. Like before Trump took office, they had some plan to invest like a billion dollars.
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