Yanis Varoufakis

What did he do?

He got the Japanese in one room and said, okay, you have grown your trade surplus with the United States immeasurably and I'm going to smack you over the head with a blunt instrument.

And the blunt instrument is 150% tariffs if you don't agree to revalue, to increase the value of the yen.

effectively to devalue the American dollar vis-a-vis the Japanese currency.

And, you know, they rolled over.

And the result is that Japan is finished, kaput, ever since the Plaza Accords.

So, you know, all this, I mean, in a sense, you're quite right.

He's bringing a new intensity of chaotic behavior, and a lot of it is personal.

But you said that there were AI or randomly chosen tariff rates.

Look, by the way, there were not.

There was a very simple deterministic formula.

He simply...

computed his tariffs, the Liberation Day tariffs, in proportion to the trade deficit the United States had with particular countries.

It was really very, there was nothing reciprocal about them.

It was, you know, the greater your trade surplus towards the United States, the greater the tariff I'm going to slap on you.

But he never meant to keep these.

These were simply, you know, these blunt instruments that he used to batter people around, to hit them about the head, and then say, okay, now come and negotiate with me, each one of you separately.

Now, he has gone into a territory of personal self-celebration that we've never seen from any American president in the past.

That's quite correct.

I mean, I was astonished at the way he has behaved vis-à-vis Prime Minister Modi of India.