Kenneth Raposa
speaker
133 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Kenneth Raposa’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's very simple because the consumer is king. We have to be able to fill our garages, not with cars. We have to fill our garages with ski mobiles, canoes, children's play sets, toys no one uses, skis that have been known as used, 50,000 pairs of shoes. That's why they want you to buy all these things. No one buys like the United States. No one's ever going to be a consumer like the United States.
The average American consumer has a $6,000 revolving debt on their credit card. In the UK, I think it's $2,000. In Japan, it's zero. So, I mean, that's why they'd have a complaint. They wanted the United States. The United States is the free market. There is no other free market but the United States. Yeah, Singapore has zero tariffs. Okay. Singapore. Okay.
California is like... I mean, the Massachusetts economy is probably bigger than Singapore. So, I mean... You know, whatever. Good for them, right? So, you know, they never complained because they thought that as long as Americans could buy cheap goods in their shop until they drop, then Wall Street was fine with that. And of course, the Capitol Hill was fine with that.
And so, you know, but look, a happy consumer is a happy voter, you know, so maybe there's a connection. Or a happy voter, you know, but we have not always seen that though, have we? Because the consumer has been very happy for a long time.
You know, consumers have been very happy for a long time and there's been unrest in this country politically because of the, because of global trade, because of how that is set up and because politicians are not listening to what Americans are saying on that issue since the 1990s. Where we are today is because of that, you know?
You got Trump, and that has been his centerpiece argument for, you know, since 2016. He ran on trade.
Look, oh no, the Atlantic and the Democratic advocacy media was shocked by Trump. I mean, I don't even know what to say to that. Of course, he could literally come out and say, we found an alien race and they're going to cure cancer and they're friendly and here's their big spaceship and they're going to teach us how to travel at warp speed. And it would be like, what? These guys...
you know, it would be the end of the world. It's the apocalypse. Yeah, how dare he? How dare he do that? We totally discount anything that they say. Now, as far as the rest of the world goes, no, the Europeans are absolutely beside themselves with grief. The economist today is talking about how this is the end of the world.
There's a big image of Orange Man Trump carving out the United States from the rest of the planet. Like we're somehow the bad guys and we hate the rest of the world and we're giving the rest of the world the big middle finger and tell them to go fend for themselves. The United States has been the consumer market for all of their goods forever.
And all we're saying is, can we please be a consumer of our own goods? Not all, not 100%, but some. Can it be possible? We don't have antibiotics in this country that we make, at least not in big numbers. We have one company that makes amoxicillin, which is a pedicillin, which would have saved you from COVID if you had it in 2011. I can count one company on my hand.
So Ireland is going to cry about all that because they're the big pharmaceutical guys because they lowered taxes or whatever the tax rate is in order to attract all American pharmaceutical companies there. Look, what if you didn't have all of these medications? What if your country didn't have it? What would you think about it?
If you want us just to be totally import dependent, this is a terrible idea. So the United States is saying, we're still going to trade with the world. We still want to buy your BMWs and Jaguars, okay? That's not going to end, but we want you to invest in our country. If you don't want to, and the American consumer decides he's not going to buy the BMW, okay? He's going to buy a
a Tesla instead or whatever, then that's their prerogative and that's you. You failed. And I will say this, I believe BMW has a factory in Mexico, so they could stop crying because they could just ship cars from Mexico to the United States.
Okay. Well, I did give you a worst case too because I said, again, using our amazing widget factory, I said that if we require parts from Vietnam and Southeast Asia in order to make our widget, and we're just a small company with 10 guys running the show, that we are going to be in trouble because we can't tell those guys, hey, let's up the ante.
And instead of buying 1,000, we're going to buy 2,000 because maybe we don't have the money to do that. We got to go to our banker and we got to get out a loan to do those things for our suppliers to say, okay, I'll lower the price for you because you're increasing your volume. We might not be able to do that.
And so when we order those goods from a customer and our customer broker is going to call us up and say, hey, Ken, you just ordered $100,000 worth of goods that's coming out of Maersk ship on June 1st. And you owe us, you got to deposit $100,000 with customs. Right. You know, that's going to be a problem. That's going to be a headache for us. That's going to be a big headache for us.
Look at this. Look at this. Go ahead. Yeah. Okay. You and I, not our widget factory. I'll give myself an example because I don't... We're sick. We're sick. The doctor says you're diabetic. You've got to stop eating the chocolate cake every day or you're going to be on dialysis. I can't stop eating chocolate cake. I must keep eating it because I love it. Okay. That's the story.
You're going to be on dialysis by the time you're 60 years old and you'll be living on it until you're dead. Or I can say, okay, I'm going to stop eating chocolate cake as much as it sucks. And the doctor says, you're in fine health. I'm not too happy about this fact that I'm not going to eat chocolate cake, but at least I'm happy in the long term that I'm going to be healthier. This is long term.
We're thinking long term here. We're thinking What am I going to do to rearrange global trade? Because the way global trade is now, it is set to manufacture things in Asia. Yes, the United States innovates, but after we innovate, we don't mass produce. Asia masses produce. Look, there's a company in my home state, Massachusetts, called Boston Dynamics.
They make those stupid, ugly robotic dogs that you've probably seen. and some cyborg robots.
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