68. Trump's Market Chaos - The Mooch’s View From Wall Street

0:06Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US. I'm Katty Kay. I'm Anthony Scaramucci in a bomb shelter, in a market bomb shelter, Caddy. You know, I was having such a good life until the market crashed. Yeah, we are going to talk about that. And we're very excited to have all of our founding members joining us. You are coming to us from all over today, Norway, Finland, Detroit, Michigan, Connecticut. but here is my very favorite. The person who is taking a walk along the canal, an evening stroll in Stratford-upon-Avon. So I wish I was there with you. That sounds absolutely heaven, MSHelder79. Send us your questions.

0:50We are recording this on Monday afternoon, and it's great to have you all, our founding members, watching live. To those of you listening on, I guess we call it catch up, if you want to watch live next time, of course, you can sign up and become a member of the club at therestispoliticsus.com. So I think Anthony's given a little bit of the game away, but today we are going to talk about the state of Donald Trump's economy. Things are looking a little hairy. I'm impressed with Anthony's calm, given that the markets are tumbling as we're giving you this recording. I'm crying on the inside, Katty.

1:26Crying on the inside. You're very good at hiding it. Yeah, I'm crying. You always look sort of debonair. Yeah. But we have seen beyond just the markets today, we wanted to do this because there's a lot worth talking about. We've seen a slew of layoffs, obviously some of them in the public sector, worth talking about that. Hiring seems to be slowing down. And then we are getting conflicting messages from members of Donald Trump's administration on whether Americans should now be preparing for a recession or not be preparing for a recession. This, of course, it's having an impact on Donald Trump's approval ratings.

2:02They are slipping for the first time. He's underwater since he was elected. So how much of this is on him? Then in the second half of this little live YouTube live stream, we are going to talk about Canada's new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, and what his feisty words, loving the Canadians getting feisty at the moment, and what they could mean for Donald Trump and for relations between these two great neighbors. So, Anthony, do you want to start? We can talk about the sort of macroeconomic picture in a minute, but tell us why you think the markets are selling off so rapidly today. I think, call me naive, Donald Trump gets elected.

2:44He is king of markets. He loves the stock market. He loves deregulation. He wants a sugar high for the American economy. That's what happened the first time around. And one thing we kept hearing Donald Trump talk about that you and I have criticized the Democrats actually for not talking about enough was his stock market. So we saw some of that, right? When he was first elected, the stock market responded well. They thought they were going to get that deregulatory period, that this was going to be a big period of mergers and acquisitions. And so why is it all going to hell in the hang basket today?

3:19Well, I mean, there's a lot of different reasons, but let me just tell you the two things that are going on, which always tugs at the market. There are Wall Streeters that voted for Donald Trump. And so they're in the he's playing 4D chess mode and he's putting pressure on the Fed by wreaking havoc in the world of markets through the tariffs and a result of which the bond market is sold off for the U.S. And this will create a space for the Federal Reserve to cut rates. And this is the 4D chess game. Donald Trump ends up with a lower cost of borrowing. And then he sugar rushes the market, to use your expression, and all will be fine in a three-ish month period of time.

4:06Then there's a group of people that are looking at the markets and saying, wow, this would be my friend Steve Cohen, the owner of the Mets from Point72. he would be saying, okay, the Doge stuff sounds interesting on paper, but it's actually deconsumptive and it's austerity. That's very bad. And oh, the president is actually putting tariffs into a marketplace that those tariffs would no longer work. And so in 1987, when Donald Trump put out that full page ad in the New York Times and said that we need to put up tariffs and be tough with our trading people. Maybe these tariffs would have worked then, but it's 38 years later, Caddy, and the entire markets, the global markets are integrated as we discussed.

4:53And you gave that great example about lobster going from Maine to Canada back to Maine, 50 % surcharge when they're done with all the tariffs. And so we're very integrated. And I think people are looking around saying that the prices of everything are uncertain now. I've got to get into what's known as a risk-off position. And so people on the margin are selling their risk on assets. That includes the market, cryptocurrency, and other things. So they're kind of thinking, what's safe? Maybe I go into gold. I love it. I'm sounding like a financial trader at the moment, which is terrifying. Or bonds.

5:30Gold is up almost 11 % this year. So gold is actually outperforming all their asset classes right now. So, but Donald, okay, get inside Donald Trump's head for me for a second, because Donald Trump put the tariffs, announced the tariffs on Canada and Mexico. The next day, he pulled those tariffs off and gave them a month's reprise. Then he put them on Mexico and Canada again. And then the next day, he takes them off again with another month's reprieve. If you are an investor in the American stock market or an investor in the American economy, if you're a business person thinking, shall I make investments in my dental office, or shall I make investments in my home building factory?

6:23Are you thinking, oh, well, actually, the fact that he takes them off again each time after putting them on means he doesn't really want to do these tariffs. He's just trying to get something out of the Canadians. Maybe he wants a few more Mounties on the border, or he wants to make sure, I don't know what it is exactly he wants, but I'm sure he's told the Canadians in his negotiations what he wants. Or if it's from Mexico, maybe he wants all of the fentanyl drug offices, warehouses shut down. Is that the position you might be taking? Or are you thinking, well, actually, the fact that he puts them on each time, even though the market clearly doesn't love it, maybe he really, really does want the tariffs.

7:03And this final month of reprieve in April is the last one that Canada or Mexico are going to get. So there's a cursory position, and then there's a deep analysis. So the cursory position is, whoa, he actually doesn't know what he's doing. and there's a tug of war between the people that do and don't like tariffs and him. And some of the executives like the automobile executives are scaring him. And that's why he delayed the tariffs. But remember, he left the tariffs on with China, which is still our largest trading partner, second largest trading partner, Canada being our first 20 % tariff. So that's a big blow.

7:42But there's a secondary thing that's going on. And just give me a moment to explain this to people. well, then I'd like you to react to it. So when the UK brexits, now they have to renegotiate with the EU. Only you say it as a verb and it's kind of great. Is it a verb? It's not a verb, but I like it when you say it as a verb to Brexit. Okay. All right. You're correcting my English, but you know, I can barely speak English. So just stay with me, Katty. I'm with you. Okay. The analysis is actually, I think, well thought out, but let me hear your reaction to it. When the UK leaves the economic union, the European Economic Union, they have to negotiate a deal with the economic union, but they're in a weaker position.

8:26When it got set up, there was parity among all the players and a result of which they were in a more advantageous position. They go into a weaker position. It has 10 years of economic consequence for the UK. When the United States is now going after all of its trading partners, it's going to force a reset. And I would suggest to you that any deal that the United States made from 1945 to the year 2000 because of U.S. supremacy was beneficial to the United States. It's now 2025. The United States is less supreme, if we're just being honest, which is probably why Trump is flailing and swinging like a big boy.

9:10Because there's more global competition. This is more global competition. So when you start pulling yourself out of these trading deals, and then you go to pull yourself back into them, the analogies I'm using is the UK with the EU. And I think the US ends up in a much weaker position as a result of all this. And by the way, that's a deeper analysis that a lot of these market participants are doing. And they're saying, wow, the US has really lost the plot here. They were controlling the card table, even though on a relative basis, other players got larger. They could have maintained their supremacy position.

9:48But Donald Trump is flailing, not thinking this out. He's going to end up Brexiting, to use that verb again, the United States from the world. And when it reenters these trading agreements, it's going to reenter from a much weakened position. There'll be a forward president that's going to have to clean up the mess of Donald Trump, and they'll be in a much weaker position. Okay, what do you think of that analysis? That's super interesting. And it ties in with something that Donald Trump has been saying recently. Now, Donald Trump doesn't like to admit weakness. And as I said, during his first term, he talked a lot about his stock market and how well his stock market is doing.

10:29It's a thing he does. He likes things around him and that he creates to be fantastic. But it's been interesting to me that over the last few days, it's Donald Trump in interviews, an interview on Fox News that he gave this weekend, who didn't rule out the possibility of recession in the United States. Now, you would think that Donald Trump being the carrot he is would never want to have any admission that there could be recession in his America. But he didn't rule it out. It was even more striking because his commerce secretary, also in an interview over the weekend, told Americans that they should prepare for the possibility of a recession in the United States.

11:08No, I'm going to flip that. The commerce secretary said that Americans will never have a recession in the United States. He was emphatic and said, he was asked, should Americans prepare for a recession? He kind of pounced on the interviewer and said, no, no, no, not in our America. there won't be a recession. And then a few hours later, Donald Trump goes on television and says, actually, you should prepare for a recession. So I think that Donald Trump is softening the American public up. And I almost wonder if in a moment that is quite rare for Trump, this sort of reflects his ideology, that he really does have this ideological mission to make America more self-sufficient, stop all these trade deficits that America has with other countries, which he's never liked anyway, produce more at home, consume more at home.

12:00I mean, it's the ultimate kind of local economy that he seems to want right now. And he is moving very fast to try and get it because he knows he doesn't have much time, right? In two years time, there's going to be midterm elections. He may lose control of Congress. He only has one term anyway. And so he has to move very fast and very boldly. And I wonder if we're actually seeing a rare moment of Donald Trump acting out of ideology here, acting out of principle. I mean, it may not be the right principle. It may crash the American economy, but he's kind of saying, look, you're going to have a lot of pain.

12:37This could hurt you, but we're enacting a revolution and with revolutionary change comes some pain initially. Okay. So he's playing - Is that what he's doing? I think that's a plausible idea. and - I'm not saying, look, I'm not saying it's the right idea. And I can't find an economist who thinks it's a good idea, but I think that is kind of what he's doing. That's why he's moving so fast. I think it's, again, thoughtful. And I think it's in line with a lot of the MAGA people think. The MAGA people are saying that he's hardcore on this because he needs to keep all of the people in the MAGA boat aligned going into the midterms.

13:19He doesn't want to breach in his hardcore base and his hardcore base wants this, but I don't think they want it, Caddy. And I will just say the president, I would say to the president, not that he's listening, but I would say to the president, you once told me on a campaign plane that his base, Donald Trump said, quote, my base is fiscally liberal and socially conservative. And so my base wants the spend from the government. My base wants full on Keynesian government derived demand to boost consumption and raise GDP. And that's what he did in the first term. And that's frankly what Joe Biden did for four years.

14:06And so now he's deconsumpting, right? He's doge. He's creating regressive taxation through tariffs. And so it's going against the core base, even though he campaigned on it. It is going against the core base. Now, what he didn't campaign on, and I never heard him say this unless you did. I don't remember him being at a rally last summer and saying, hey, listen, I'm going to make Canada the 51st state. I don't remember him saying that. Did he say that? I don't remember that. I don't remember him saying we're going to take over the Panama Canal and we're going to absorb Greenland. See, these ideas where they're in isolation are not popular.

14:49So what is he exactly doing? Like what is going on? And again, I think this is a sphere of influence gamble that he's making. I think he's saying, here, Vlad, let me tell you the checklist, Vlad. Crash US and Western markets. Check. Tariff allies make allies miserable. Touch off a global trade war that impacts my Western allies. Check. Cut funding to Ukraine. Check. Iraq, threatened to withdraw NATO forces, US troops from NATO, and use Belakassi of rhetoric about the obsolescence of NATO. Get my buddy Elon Musk to tell people on X, which is now under cyber attack as you and I are speaking, but get my buddy Elon Musk to say that NATO is obsolete.

15:43Okay, how's he doing on the Vladimir Putin checklist category? Yeah. You know, there's a really interesting piece in the FT over the weekend that's worth people looking at where a data reporter looks at the similarities between Russian values and American values compared to Western values. And on many of those things you've just mentioned, Donald Trump's America is more closely aligned with Russia than it is with Western Europe. I don't know that that's where it wants to be in the long term for its own security. So I read that article and I think that that is, I mean, all right, probably going to get in trouble here, but I think he's got a cult-like hold on his group and he's a chanter of Russian propaganda.

16:30And so that cult is saying Russian propaganda. If I hold this up, this mouse here, I say, this is green. The MAGA people are like, okay, that's green. That mouse is green. It's green? Okay, it's green. You know, tariffs are good for the United States. Well, they must be good for the United States. Tariffs are not good for the United States. And by the way, to the MAGA supporter, tariffs are not good for you. Your income, based on the analysis of the demography, you get crushed by the tariffs. So I read the article and you're right, his group of people does believe that, but it's really still out of sync with their heart and So when they sit down in the kitchen and these are kitchen table issues and they say to themselves, well, how are we doing?

17:18Well, he's slowing down the capital markets. So that's going to cause a recession. He's increasing the tariffs. You're going to have less disposable income. Fewer immigrants or potentially a source of labor problems. What about the price of eggs, Kat? How are we doing with the price of eggs? Doing all right? Price of eggs. I paid$9 for eggs this weekend. For a dozen eggs, I paid$9. in my local supermarket in Virginia. Crazy, right? And these were not even, I've had a happy life living in a nice green field, eating buttercups, eggs. These were just regular eggs and they were still$9. In the first Trump administration, by the way, here's a weird statistic that I came up with.

17:58Donald Trump spent more giving aid to farmers, American farmers who had been hurt by retaliatory tariffs from China than the Department of Defense spent on US nuclear delivery systems and weapons. That is how out of whack this is. So you impose tariffs, somebody imposed tariffs against you, and then you have to shore up that industry and spend$30 billion keeping farmers happy. Okay, here's a great question from Gareth, actually, I wanted to ask you this. Gareth Frank, when Liz Truss caused panic in the UK with her 2022 budget, market forces led to her premiership collapsing, how much damage could market forces do to Trump's power and his presidency?

18:44What do you think, Anthony? I mean, the answer is a lot. She lasted 4.1 Scaramucci's. And actually, I think David Cameron told me she was mad at me for that. I thought it was a joke. People have to take themselves a lot seriously. But we're into five Scaramucci's of the Trump presidency, and he's causing himself a lot of damage, like a lot of damage. And he's getting calls now from people, more than one call from business executives saying, are you sure this is the direction you want to go in? There'll be another 10 or 15 % drop in the market very easily as a result of what he's doing. Because again, Caddy, I have to figure out what I'm earning.

19:25I have to also then figure out what I can invest in. And oh, by the way, since I don't know the answer to that, I've got to get myself into cash. And every CFO at all these major companies are doing that. So the LizTrust example is a good one. There was another question, if you don't mind, it's a new member and thank you for joining us. It was about the American military. It was about the question related to does the American military have any power Or are they up for the type of things that Donald Trump is looking to do? And, you know, the short answer to that is they're not up for it. And that would be a big problem.

20:05You know, like when I've talked to former generals, now retired generals, suppose the president's giving you an order, he's the commander in chief, and it's not something that you want to do. Well, if it's breaching the Constitution, they have a moral duty to reject that. And then there could be a court martial and then there would be a trial. But if it's not breaching the Constitution and he's giving you an order, you more or less have to follow that order. So again, you're in dangerous territory with Donald Trump if you think that he could potentially do something that we don't want to see happen.

20:42So this is all in the soup. Now, remember, we're talking about the market. So I brought that question up because that's another drop in market uncertainty. Yeah. And I think it's like predictability, Kat. Right. And one thing that is worth mentioning is all of this is going to spread. One of the things I think that is so extraordinary about Donald Trump is that he is involved in two revolutions at the same time. He is trying to remake the whole American government at the same. Is one of them a Russian revolution? I'm just asking. Is there a Russian revolution going on? Are we back in the beginning of the 1900s?

21:18And in which case, who are the czars? And then the other thing he's trying to do is remake America's relationship with the rest of the world. And he's trying to do, you could not say that this is not an ambitious presidency. He's trying to do an enormous amount in a short period of time. And his supporters will say, as Anthony did earlier, this is chess and that he knows what he's doing. And yes, there may be some short term pain, but he's going to get the gains in the long run. But there are an increasing number of people who are looking at this and saying, what's the plan? is there a plan and who actually knows what they're doing.

21:51We're going to take a quick break and come back in a moment to talk about Mark Carney.

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23:08So a new prime minister to be up in Canada, who is also sounding feisty about the relationship with the United States. I thought it was very interesting that Mark Carney, in his very first address after winning the leadership contest of the Liberal Party in Canada, chose to go direct to Trump and said Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape or form. We didn't ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves. Americans should make no mistake, this good Canadian warned, in trade as in ice hockey, Canada will win. I mean, if you had said a year ago that a new Canadian leader of the Liberal Party would feel that they had to give a speech like that in order to shore up their support at home, in order to satisfy public opinion at home, in order to show Washington that he meant business, I would not have believed it.

24:16I can see the benefits of what Donald Trump is doing vis-a-vis Europe. I think that actually it's time Europe became responsible for its own security. and there is an upside to getting tough on Europe. They're actually starting to move now in ways that Europe needed to do 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and didn't do. But the upside of getting tough on Canada like this, I find that much harder to see. I don't see what the benefit is to the United States of making an enemy out of Canada. All right. So I'm going to just ask you to contemplate this though. So when you have excess armaments around the world, you increase the likelihood of war.

24:58The reason why the US and other nuclear powers tried to prevent nuclear proliferation, more nukes out there, a loose nuke could end up on like Al Qaeda eBay, and then we're all in trouble. And so I'm not a fan of Europe rearming. That's just me personally. I'm a fan of Europe bolstering its defenses, but I'm a fan of them working closely with the Americans on trade, helping the American economy so that the Americans can maintain their security umbrella. This is before Donald Trump became president. That's no longer an option. Donald Trump's made it quite clear that Americans are not going to maintain its security umbrella.

25:40I want to say something normative because we have a lot of Europeans out there, and I want them to know that there are Americans in this country that do think the way I do. And the new chancellor from Germany said it best, Donald Trump's America, no, they want Europe to be alone. Donald Trump wants Europe to be alone. But lots of Americans, maybe not all, but a lot of Americans understand what I'm about to say. We need to be integrated with Europe, less armaments, the better. That's just, again, me personally, and that's for me studying history for 55 years. As it relates to Carney, I love this guy, okay, because he's a tough SOB, and he's a masculine guy.

26:27Donald Trump is hyper-masculine or over-masculine, caddy, which means he's really not that masculine. So he's flailing all the time. He's trying to prove that he's masculine, which is almost a sense that he's not masculine. But this SOB, Mark Carney, is actually a really tough, masculine guy, doesn't care, take no prisoners attitude. And the United States better listen to what I'm about to say because I've done the calculation. The natural resources in Canada per capita overwhelm the United States. We have 335, 340 million people living south of the Canadian border, north of the Mexican border in the 48 states.

27:13These guys have 40.1 million people in Canada with unbelievable amounts of resources. And if they start redirecting, reallocating their resources, and you just shove them in a very nationalistic, prideful, patriotic way where even the people in Quebec are siding with the people in Ontario. Imagine that. When I left college, they were thinking about succeeding. You remember when the province of Quebec was thinking about succeeding? They were all locked in with each other. But also Trump, I really think, killed the chances of that conservative. Of Poilier, who was actually, what, 10, 15 points ahead.