James Altucher
speaker
316 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 1 Apr
James Altucher’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Smoot-Hawley was almost a 60% tariff, or let's say 50% tariff on everything that was being imported. So 50%, if you put a 50% tariff, you're basically saying, we don't want to trade with you ever again. If you put a 10% tariff, you're saying, please trade with us as much as possible so we make that 10%. And you're also saying with these reciprocal tariffs, hey, you tariff us, we tariff you,
let's call the whole thing off. Like, let's just meet at the negotiating table and negotiate, which is what he's been doing with Canada, with Mexico, with China. Look, Apple today just announced they're going to spend $500 billion today in the U.S. to build factories here so they can make products here. So $500 billion is a lot of money.
And Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor, they just announced they're going to spend $200 billion building tech facilities here to avoid tariffs. So we're already in one day. We're already seeing the results. Like $700 billion just announced in 24 hours is a huge impact on the economy.
We'll all cancel it out. Think about a negotiation with your job. Let's say someone's at a job and they want to negotiate a higher salary And let's say they're really truly willing to leave. They say to their boss, I'm leaving, see you later. And the boss says, wait, wait, wait, let me make a counter offer. And the right response is, well, I'm leaving, see you later. And you walk out the door.
You gotta really show people that you're serious in a negotiation or else they take advantage. And I'm not talking about Trump, I'm just talking about every negotiation in the world. If you show you're scared and you're not afraid to do what you say you're gonna do, you're gonna lose the negotiation. So this is my theory of what Trump's doing. He said, let's just do this first.
And yeah, there's gonna be a lot of people afraid, including the leaders of foreign countries and the CEOs of major companies and the stock market, unfortunately. and then i'm just going to be silent for a while and and see what happens so we already see like hundreds of billions of dollars worth of announcements canada and mexico clearly are negotiating with us by the way in 2018
With Mexico, we put all these tariffs on. Then by 2019, all the tariffs were dropped. Mexico dropped all their tariffs against us.
Mexico and Canada. China, in 2020, agreed to spend $200 billion on purchasing stuff in the U.S. They agreed to start prosecuting theft of intellectual property, which was a big problem between China and the U.S. So with every country, we have strategic... and financial issues. And Trump is just laying it all out and putting it on the negotiating table.
And his argument is, oh, I just want fair trade. But he wants other things, too. He wants some strategic objectives. By the way, I'm not saying he's going to achieve those. We're just kind of getting into his mind right now. And like rather than rather than saying, oh, he's trying to destroy the country. This is what he's trying to do.
And then we have to decide whether he's going to say what he's trying to do.
Then there's a fourth thing, which is also to negotiate other strategic initiatives, like maybe like a bargaining chip. Yeah. So like with China, stop sending fentanyl into the US. Then we'll lower tariffs with Canada.
Well, China, they're getting it from China and Mexico is getting it from China. And this is from all the law enforcement agencies. Then then cartels that operate out of these two places on the border, they're sending it into the US. But it's all originating in China. So so that's why it's a negotiating stance for for Trump.
Well, I think with the strategic stuff, I think it's already happening. We've already seen negotiations with Canada, Mexico, and even China, and also these companies that are... Well, okay, let's talk about moving manufacturing in the U.S. I don't know how it's going to go in general, but we just see evidence that...
A, Apple, again, the $500 billion investment, then Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor. And then you look at 2018, roughly there was, they estimate about 30,000 new auto worker jobs were created in the US because of tariffs on cars on China or on Asia in general. And so there's evidence that that does bring, now, do we want manufacturing here?
I don't know, but there's evidence that it does bring manufacturing here. And so now, does it generate revenues? I actually don't think the tariffs are gonna generate much, in revenues. I think people will stop buying products that are too expensive. So then there's no tariffs. If you don't buy the foreign product, there's not going to be a tariff here.
So I don't think it's going to generate much in revenues. Maybe the 10% blanket tariff. So let's say we have $3.5 trillion worth of foreign imports. So a 10% blanket tariff would normally generate $350 billion annually. Maybe it'll, because fewer people will be buying foreign goods, maybe it'll go down to $250 billion in revenues annually, which is not bad, but it's not amazing.
I mean, personal income taxes generates $2.5 trillion in revenues for the US. So this blanket tariff will only alleviate 10% of that.
I agree. So other things that happened, and again, we can look at 2018, other things that happened is manufacturing spread out a little bit more. So instead of it all being in China, we went to Vietnam, we went to India, we went to places where we weren't putting on as high of a tariff, or we worked out deals to make the tariffs and duties lower.
The other thing is, by the way, where are the workers? Because in the US, we're essentially deporting a lot of the workers. So... what's going to happen is robotics companies are really starting to amp up their investment. And you have things like the Optimus robot being built at Tesla. I don't know when that's going to be ready for prime time, let's say 2026, 2027, but that's going to be
the new factory worker. I mean, already Tesla's automating a lot of their energy products, so they could build an electric grid almost automatically with robots. So we're going to see some transition in technology that's going to replace the workers also. Doesn't mean the workers are going to be out of jobs. They just won't be at those jobs.
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