Peter Baker
speaker
291 appearances
9 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Jan
Peter Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is how economic downturns happen. One key trigger is when the cost of borrowing money goes up, and especially quickly, that can be a real shock to the system.
President Trump's announcement of universal tariffs on the whole world, including the European Union, is a major blow to the world economy.
The consequences will be dire for millions of people around the globe.
The Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq were all down more than 3% at one point.
Global markets are also taking a hit.
My fear, I gotta say, my fear is that stocks are down and they stay down for a protracted period of time.
Honestly, difficult to convey how big a deal this is. This is an astonishing development. It is a development that takes direct aim at the mode of globalization that has dominated most of our lives. I mean, we have grown up in a world where we've been invited to imagine that place really doesn't matter.
If you've got container ships that can bridge the oceans and you send factory production wherever it's cheapest or most efficient, then factory in Ohio is the functional equivalent of a factory in China.
And whatever you think about these tariffs and how they're going to play and whether they're going to fix the problems that have popped up and emerged from trade policy, this is clearly taking direct aim at that sense of place isn't supposed to matter. That's right.
And where we essentially make policy on the strength of the argument that the consumer must be served and the consumer wants cheap stuff. And cheap stuff has, in the last few decades, come in from places like China, Mexico as well. And this is a reorientation of policy that at least, you know, on its face is about making We got to make stuff in the United States.
There are a lot of reasons to doubt whether it'll work, whether it will satisfy the people it's aimed at satisfying. But that, at least in broad strokes, is the policy. Globalization is bad. Making stuff at home is good.
Look, it's always been about China, principally. And that's because China is the world's factory. It's the place where enormous amounts of investment went chasing cheaper wages. In the free trade era, yeah. In the free trade era, I mean. China has become the dominant purveyor of all kinds of things, from auto parts to chemicals to sneakers and clothing and exercise bikes.
So if you come at things, as Trump does, from the standpoint that a bilateral trade deficit, which is a fancy way of saying we buy more stuff from you than you buy from us, if you come at it from the standpoint that that's bad and a sign that you're getting ripped off, which is a concept that economists take real issue with, then China stands out.
Well, Vietnam is effectively an extension of China.
This is precisely because in the first Trump administration, when Trump unleashed these tariffs, a lot of big companies like Walmart, to pick an obvious example, but really every company that sells into North American markets, well, we don't want to pay all these tariffs to China. Seems like this U.S.-China divorce thing is real. We better go find another lower-wage country.
And moreover, Chinese companies moved a lot of investment into places like Vietnam and Cambodia, and they just exported their model to these other countries.
This is meant to catch that and divert production to friendlier places from the Trump administration standpoint.
Mm hmm. Can I throw a wonky point at you? Sure. So I think it's worth remembering that there's so much integration between the U.S., Mexican, Canadian economies that when we buy a finished good from Mexico... something like 30 cents on the dollar, the value of that good, actually made in the United States, you know, with American labor.
The counterpart number for China is three cents on the dollar. And Chinese state policy is directed at driving that number as close to zero as possible. So it's been true you know, going back to the first Trump administration, that if we assume, and there are a lot of reasons to debate, you know, what's the real objective? What does Trump really want to do? Does he just want to centralize power?
Does he want chaos? Whatever. But if we take as a given, just for the sake of this conversation, it's about bringing production back to the United States, generating jobs in the United States. Well, it's always been true that Mexico and Canada are the potential solution, I'm putting in air quotes, to our also air quoted China problem.
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