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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And we've gone through a very bewildering couple of months where it seemed like, oh, no, maybe Mexico is the enemy to the Trump administration.
It's creating opportunities for Americans. This is starting to make a lot more sense to me.
30,000 parts in modern cars.
I think that cars are the most obvious place to drive the reshoring strategy. You know what I'm saying? We will stick you with tariffs if you don't make your stuff in the United States with a whole bunch of caveats. You know, let's take a look at a company like Hyundai. This is the group that owns not only Hyundai, the brand, but Kia as well. This is a South Korean company. Right.
So they've spent significant amounts of money setting up factories in Georgia And they did that with the understanding that they could tap the global supply chain for their parts and components. Now we're telling them you're going to pay more for steel, more for aluminum. We're not sure what is going to apply in terms of tariffs, if you're bringing electronics from Malaysia, from China.
And so the net effect of this could be, and we don't really know how this will play out, that Hyundai will say, well, whatever we're going to do, we're going to do it more slowly. Maybe we won't add that extra shift. In the U.S. Yeah. I mean, you could see the pressure to move faster, to reduce your import of finished cars from Korea, replace that with your domestically made cars.
Except, again, you don't know about your access to the global supply chain. It's not like you can just flip a switch and suddenly all the stuff you need to make a car just comes back to the United States. Right.
Exactly. And so here's this policy that's supposed to be about bringing jobs back to the United States, creating more jobs for blue collar workers. And we've taken aim at some jobs that are already here. We have injected greater anxiety, added more variables and uncertainty to this large multinational company that did exactly what they were supposed to be doing.
Nice little tech economy you got here. I hope nothing happens to it.
Because Europe is like the California of the world. It's the one market that's big enough that the standards that they set affect – the nature of business everywhere. Europe's huge. I mean, you're talking about 27 countries that extend from Greece to Ireland.
And if Europe, if they start to take a coherent approach to privacy and they start to look at taxation, that will be a significant problem for a very big chunk of the U.S. economy. And that would open up a vast new front in this global trade war.
If they threaten access, they threaten new taxes, new regulations. Yes, that could be further force toward business leaders saying, hold on a second, we didn't sign up for this. We signed up for tax cuts and deregulation and business as usual. We didn't sign up for getting kicked out of our potentially largest market on earth.
Oh, I think that's absolutely true. We don't know. And in fact, it's not at all clear that there's an appetite amongst business leaders who are afraid to cross MAGA. Whatever happens, tariffs, stock market falling. But I think it's fair to say that does seem to be part of the European strategy in terms of retaliation.
So the typical thing you retaliate on is you go after bourbon because you hit Mitch McConnell's home state of Kentucky. Right. You go after grains because you hit the upper Midwest and especially red states like, you know, Indiana and Nebraska. And so this is taking it to a new set of Trump allies if you go digital. Whether it will work is a whole other question.
Well, the obvious place China goes is agriculture. They go after American farmers. Yeah. I mean, China buys a ton of soybeans from the U.S., and they have an alternative in that they can look to South America, especially Brazil and Argentina. There are other parts of agriculture that would likely get hit as well.
Okay, best case scenario. We see companies take the hit in terms of their margins, right? So Chinese suppliers, Mexican suppliers say, well, we want to maintain our market share in the U.S., so we will drop our price to the brands that are buying our stuff, and prices go up a little bit, but not as much as the tariff.
And in the meantime, the overall thrust of the policy works, and more investment comes into the U.S., builds more factories, we make more stuff in the U.S., and then eventually the suppliers follow their customers, and we're making the piece parts of industry in the U.S., And we get more jobs in four years. That is the rosiest possible picture you can imagine.
The worst case scenario is that prices go up quite dramatically. And the result of that is a so-called destruction of demand. You know, oh, you need a car because your old car is getting old. Well, you go off and you see that prices are up quite a bit. Mm-hmm. The domestic cars on offer are hard to get because there's more demand for that, and that's driving their prices up.
And you're hearing horror stories about how hard it is to fix a car. And so you just defer your purchase and kind of muddle through. And meanwhile, you know, the cost of everything from exercise, clothing to groceries is going up. And so you're buying less, and that leads to a good old-fashioned recession. where people lose jobs and the economy slows down and people's living standards decline.
And by the way, you know, the political implications of that are likely to be quite unpleasant.
Showing 41–60 of 291 · page 3 of 15
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