Finbarr Bermingham

I mean, don't forget that earlier in his second term, we did have a period in which both sides had tariffs north of 100% on them and we saw a big fall away in trade.

So it's a bit of a fool's errand to try and protect exactly what Trump will do.

He is volatile, even though he has got characteristics which we can

in which we can certainly sense patterns.

I mean, an additional 100% would push tariffs again north of 150%, which is extreme.

I mean, it basically rules out any form of normal trade.

So it wouldn't be good for anybody, really.

It certainly wouldn't be good for Europe, because we would end up picking up a lot of diverted trade coming from the Chinese in the form of cheap imports, which

Sounds great, but if you're a local manufacturer, you may not want to see that coming down the road.

We're still trying to figure this one out.

I mean, it was dramatic over the weekend.

A Chinese company called Wingtech, which bought a controlling stake in Nexperia, the Dutch chipmaker, in 2019, filed a notice quietly at the Shanghai Stock Exchange on a Sunday saying that the Dutch government had effectively...

seized control of its asset in the Netherlands.

Now, it emerged later on Sunday evening, the Dutch government confirmed that they had used something called the Goods Availability Act, a very sort of obscure Cold War piece of legislation that's supposed to be reserved for emergency situations such as wartime.

to allow it to protect the essential flow of certain goods.

In this case, it was chips, semiconductors.

We know how important they are.

We don't know yet quite why it did this.

Was there a sense that the Chinese company was going to close the factory in the Netherlands and bring the chip making to China?

Was there some sort of leakage of technology suspected?