Bloomberg Talks
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Talks Trump Tariffs, Trade Relations, China
22 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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So here's the latest this morning. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, cancelling European tariffs that were set to begin February 1st after reaching a framework deal over Greenland. The U.S. Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, joins us now, making some waves at the World Economic Forum over the last couple of days.
Chapter 2: What are President Trump's new tariffs and their implications?
Mr. Secretary, it's good to see you. Great to see you. Let's cut through the drama. Let's get to the big point, the elephant in the room. What happened at dinner time the other night? I've heard all kinds of stories, booing, Lagarde storming out the room. What happened, sir?
Oh, this is so silly. So at the end of the evening, they called on me. I just published an op-ed in the Financial Times. And so they called on me. I gave two, three minutes of my FT, which basically said that globalization,
and the outsourcing of your industry to the lowest cost in the world had really left, had really harmed America, it had harmed Europe, and it had failed us, and that we need to reshore, need to take care of our own citizens. So that's basically the model.
And when I was done with that two or three minutes, one person of the 200-odd people in the room booed, and I felt honored because it was Al Gore. You know what I mean? Alcor food. And I was like, really?
So Madame Magad wasn't throwing bread rolls at you from the bank. That wasn't happening.
No, I mean, I put it in the FT. I mean, I wasn't like trying to be quiet about it. I mean, I think that globalization, right, and the idea of global supply chains and finding the lowest cost, I mean, that is just not the way to take care of your auto workers, right, who are in Ohio and Michigan. And so we're bringing that back. So think about
this, when we were done with, we started auto tariffs, we started working on it in March, and we finished in November.
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Chapter 3: How does Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick describe globalization's impact?
And we were done, the last day when we finished, General Motors and Ford stocks each went up 10%. General Motors ended the year up 60%. If I had told you on January 1st that General Motors was gonna be on 60%, you would all say, oh stop it. And how about this, on that same day, Sean Fain, who runs the United Auto Workers, called me and said, I can't believe I'm calling a Republican
Secretary of Commerce to say, thank God for you and your administration. You're the first administration who's actually taking care of the auto workers of America. So think about that. You can, if you really think it through, you can take care of the company and the worker. You don't have to pick sides because we want union labor growth in America. These are great jobs.
Why wouldn't we want them in America? So that's why Donald Trump wins the union vote because he's actually pro these workers. He literally is pro these workers. It's not a political thing. It's these are great jobs for Americans. Let's go get more of them.
There's a lot of money set to come into the United States and big beds, a ton of FDI. We can get into that in just a moment. I just want to stay on G7 allies. This week's been quite a week. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has said, basically accusing the US of trying to subordinate the Europeans.
The Prime Minister of Canada, I'm sure you've heard his speech, Mark Carney, the other day, said this is not a transition, it's a rupture. How would you describe relations with those countries at the moment?
I think our relations are perfectly fine, right? I described the relationship with respect to the whole, when Greenland was going back and forth before we sort of settled it with a framework agreement, right? I called it a kerfuffle, right? It's basically like if you have an argument with your spouse, that's not real, you know, it's not a real one. It's like a small thing.
My spouse doesn't go out there and deliver a speech after that argument and say it's the end of the relationship.
Fair enough, but... You're right, and I think they overreacted, and it's proof that they overreacted, because a day or two later, there's a framework that makes sense, right? What did we say? We said we cared about it for national security, right? We said we care about it for national security.
I mean, it's obvious we care about it for national security, because if you're gonna build a golden dome, over the United States of America, right? Wouldn't you prefer the Golden Dome cover Greenland? So when you're knocking out the missiles, you're not knocking them out right over your head. Like we've all seen Israel like knocking out the missiles right over their head with their Iron Dome.
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Chapter 4: What does Lutnick say about the auto industry and tariffs?
What does this do? They were never on.
The threat of them are coming on for February 1st. What does this do now for the agreement you and your team struck with Brussels because the legal implementation has now been put on hold?
Oh, I think it'll be put on unhold probably tomorrow. I mean, come on. That's why I said it's an overreaction. I mean, they know when the president says this is what's going to happen. I mean, what provoked the president? What provoked the president was that they sent military people to Greenland. I mean, they didn't send military people to Ukraine.
Why are they sending military people to Greenland? It seemed like a provocation.
We spoke to the Finnish leader, and he suggested that was a miscommunication, and he cleared that up pretty quickly. There's something I want to get into with you that I think is quite important. This, of course, is the art of the deal. We talk about it on the program all the time. The president anchors the story to the extreme and then gets a favorable deal for the United States.
I think that's well understood. Something happened, though, in the last 12 months that I think is really interesting. He tried the same thing with Canada and totally upended the election in Canada north of the border. Polyev was going to sail away with that. The reason Mark Carney's here as prime minister is because the president took such an assertive stance on Canada.
Now, at the time, I was finding the humor in the conversation. Then the Canadians started lighting up the Bloomberg terminal, sending messages. They were deeply offended. And we've seen that damage the economic relationship with Canada and the United States.
And the risk here, Mr. Secretary, and I'd love your thoughts on it and your reaction, because I think this is really important regarding the Europeans. The points you're making about Europe and have made over the last week are valid points. And they're actually well received by a lot of Europeans. But the style in which it's being delivered at the moment, some of them are finding it offensive.
Do you think there's a risk here that we damage the economic relationship with the Europeans in the same way we do with the Canadians? And for that matter, derail the conservative movement in Europe that's well underway?
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Chapter 5: How are U.S. relations with G7 allies currently characterized?
The Canadians have the second best deal in the whole wide world. If they continue this path, right, which is a political path of a certain thing, I'm going to go fly to China, I'm going to open up my markets to China, I'm going to take Chinese electric cars and do all sorts of this stuff, then when USMCA gets renegotiated... This year...
This year, sort of like towards the end of the summer, in the middle of the summer, do you think the President of the United States is going to say, you should keep having the second best deal in the world? I mean, you guys are such great friends. I mean, they are playing with a set of rules that they haven't really thought through.
I can hear it in your voice. You're excited about negotiating this, aren't you, later this year?
they've sort of given a sort of a roadmap of saying, so I guess we should change the whole deal, right? You want to be like the rest of the world. You don't want to be this favored neighbor because you've taken it so for granted that you're willing to come to Davos and say there's two hegemonic powers in the world and we're going to decide which one we're going to work with. Really?
You're going to either work with the United States of America where 75% of your economy is totally tied to it or China? Why would you say that? It just, I think it's political, you know, I think if we take it correctly, we should look at it as just political noise coming out of a prime minister and maybe this is working for his election, right?
Because I don't think it can be real because if you took out the math, of Canada's economy and doing business with the United States of America's $30 trillion economy. There's no such thing as changing what they have today.
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Chapter 6: What recent tensions exist between the U.S. and European countries?
No one would vote for changing what they had today. Now, maybe they're marketing it well for their politics, but they're surely not marketing it well for their fundamental economics for long-term the United States.
The U.S. is doing deals with China, and I'd love you to walk us through what's going on with the H20s. Is it accurate now that basically for China to get the H20 chips, Taiwan needs to send them to America for us to put a tariff on them to make money off it and then send to China?
And is it your understanding that China might be suspectable now to these chips, suspect because they're entering through the United States?
So it's the H200, right? So that's the chip we're talking about. And Jensen Wang came to the Oval Office and he argued that this is a better chip than they can actually make in any scale, right? So if we sell them to China, right, and Chinese businesses, then they'll start using them and they'll...
you know, develop on the American tech stack, and that will take some money away from the Chinese tech stack, and that's, it's an interesting argument. There are two sides, there are strong two sides. We shouldn't sell them any, or we should sell them the H200s. And I stand right in the middle. It was a really, really good discussion, okay?
And the president decided that, fine, we'll sell the H200s to them, okay? And he made that decision, and after he was done, he said, and you know what? I think if we do that, we should get 25% for the American taxpayers. Because we're creating something that didn't exist.
But do you think China wants to buy them, knowing that they're going from Taiwan now back to the US, then to China?
They're coming to the United States because in order to collect 25%, the process matter, to do it right, is you import it, put a tariff on it, and then export it again. And so that's the model. It's the process model to execute a plan that the President of the United States of America made. So that's just the execution model of how to do it. It's just process, right? And it's the same H200 chip.
And the question we'll find out is that businesses in China want to buy. That's for sure. The question is, does China's central government When they have that same argument, do I want to give my companies this chip that they're all clamoring for? Or do I want to force them to take the pain of using lesser chips that are domestically made, but helping our domestic companies grow?
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