Rob Kaplan
speaker
163 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 22 May
Rob Kaplan’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 — 4 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
OK, so we shouldn't forget as we go through this, we run a services surplus with the world. We're primarily a services economy. You want to make sure that we don't do damage to services while we're trying to bolster goods. And so that's, again, the balance we have to weave.
This week, yeah.
So here's why these new trade deals, as they're announced, are going to be very informative. There are some number of capital committers in the market. And I talked to a number of them who believe this has all been a negotiating strategy and that tariffs are going to come down to closer to zero. I'm afraid.
That there's another scenario, which is the Trump administration wants the tariff revenue based on their comments. It's unclear how much money Doge is saving. Hopefully they'll do it. They'll say, but it's unclear. They want more tariff revenue and their objective may not be to negotiate down to zero. It might be negotiate down to 10 or 20 or 30.
And that is going to make the create significant challenges. And we don't know. exactly which way we're going, but you hear officials saying, we want the tariff revenue and how useful the tariff revenue is, particularly when they're talking about the tax bill and a desire to do more than extend the Trump tax cuts, to get tax on tips, tax on overtime, deductibility for buying a car.
And so I think there's some confusion in the market and it's affecting securities buying, the dollar, gold, treasuries, all these asset classes. Marc Thiessen All right.
I think the U.S. exceptionalism thesis is not dead. It's alive and well. But I think it's very critical that we come out of this period over the next few years having retained U.S. exceptionalism, the greatest companies in the world, the most innovative. I think our higher education system is one of the gems of the United States, an independent fed world. rule of law, predictability.
I hope when some of these structural changes we've worked through, we want to get back where the world has confidence in the United States and we keep building many of our great strengths, which have put us in a position to outperform the world.
I think there will be some repair to do, but I actually believe we can. We can do the damage control, but I think it will be broader than tariffs. It has to do with some of the decisions we're making on foreign policy, what we're doing with our own institutions. A number of these decisions, including tariffs, I think are central to that. And yes, we can come out of this with U.S.
preeminence and having strength in our country, but it will require a real focus on that as an objective and some prioritization of many of these structural changes.
Okay. So I talked about confidence in the institutional framework of the United States, rule of law, other significant aspects that people have come to rely on. One of those institutional staples has been an independent
politically independent Federal Reserve, independent central bank, which means that the Fed, at least as it relates to monetary policy and setting the Fed funds rate, does it independent of political pressures and political considerations. So why is that so important? Because there are times, the last few years is a great example, where it's very unpopular to
for the Fed to do what it needs to do. It needed to raise rates dramatically in order to bring inflation down. It's very unpopular. You want to take that out of the political sphere and put it in an independent organization that can make these tough decisions. Okay. So now we move to today. We've got these structural changes. Growth is slowing.
I think the president, understandably, and others are hoping the Fed will be able to see their way clear to lower rates. However, there's an inflation issue. And I think Jay Powell, as I said, is trying to jawbone at a minimum that issue. And he wants to make sure that they balance their dual mandate of full employment and price stability. And so...
An independent Fed gives a lot of confidence to the financial markets, in my opinion, makes them more willing to buy the dollar, buy duration, buy US assets. But the other thing I would say is J-PAL doesn't set the Fed funds rate. There's a vote. Now, the voters are all the governors and a portion of the presidents, those votes rotate. I ran the Dallas Fed. I voted on a rotating basis.
Even if J-PAL were gone, I can tell you I don't think there's a consensus around the table to cut rates in the May meeting. They're open to it, but that's even if J-PAL wasn't there. And so I think there's some realization that institutionally you've got to build a consensus. It's got to be based on facts and analysis and debate.
And I think they may have concluded that removing J-PAL, one, would be legally problematic, but also would be institutionally very unsettling to the world. And it might not cause any change. J-PAL will leave next year, first half of next year. They will pick someone new. You want that new person to be seen as also independent, I think.
and preserving the independence of the Fed and not make any pre-commitments to the administration about what he or she will or won't do. And I think they're going to have to be careful about that.
On the being late point, I've been critical of the Fed in 2021 and 22 that I thought the Fed should
start tapering bond buying soon sooner than they did and start looking at raising rates sooner so in that regard you could criticize them and they might criticize themselves they were somewhat late the best analogy that i can think of is you're driving on the highway and you're going 65 or 70 miles an hour and people are in the back seat and they want you to go faster the same time let's take that same highway
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