Richard Miniter

Trump can escalate from here.

He thinks he has until the end of the summer, or certainly he's acting like he has until the end of the summer.

I'm not a mind reader.

And he might.

Let's talk about the global economy for a second.

So there are adjustments that would create downward pressure, but they would take more than a year to a year and a half to arrive.

So one of them is ExxonMobil in Nigeria is looking at getting into the fertilizer production business, as you know, to make fertilizer, you need natural gas, which the Nigerians have large amounts of.

It would be smart for ExxonMobil to do this because the markets that are most starved for fertilizer are in West Africa, Southern Africa, and nearby in South America, right?

The regulatory apparatus in the United States, if Trump people were able to get it out of the way, could also make large investments.

And one scenario, which the agriculture people have been speculating about, the Agriculture Department in the United States, is deregulating the production of fertilizer in the US, which would mean that the US would become a net exporter

of fertilizer and it would create a tremendous number of jobs in the lower Midwestern United States along the Mississippi Delta mainly.

And that would be because that's where the gas is and that's where the river travel is.

Right.

But these are

multi hundred billion dollar capital investments.

And to do that, there needs to be regulatory certainty.

And there's no way to do that this year because no one knows who's going to win the midterms.

And it also takes a long time to deregulate because you have to publish notice and public comment period of at least 90 to 120 days.

And then you have to respond to the comments.

And even if they started last month, they wouldn't be done before the end of the year.