Transcription
Uh, I think what happened in the stock market recently, when things came down substantially, I want to show you one of my absolute heroes. You guys ask me in the Q&A all the time, what is the interview that I enjoyed most, after, you know, for the decade plus that I've been doing this? And it is when I went to Stanford and interviewed Thomas Sowell. He does not do many interviews. Uh, we've been trying to coordinate something; we're still working on it. But he did an interview with Peter Robinson at Stanford, this in the very same, Peter's in the very same studio that we were in. And, uh, here he is criticizing Trump's tariffs. So I'm trying to show you every side of this. Take a look. What do you make of the present president of the United States and his tariffs?
It's painful to see what a ruinous decision, uh, from back in the 1920s, uh, being repeated now, in, in so far he's using these tariffs to get very strategic, uh, things settled, and, and, and that, and that he is satisfied with that. But if you set off a worldwide trade war, that, that has a devastating history, uh, everybody loses because everybody follows suit, and all that happens is that you get a great reduction in international trade. The other, it's, it's, it's disturbing in another sense. F-R, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president in the 1930s, said that you have to try things, and if, and if they, if, if they don't work, then you admit it, you abandon that, you go on something else, and you try that until you come across something that, that does work. Now that's, that's not a bad, uh, uh, approach if you are operating within a known system of rules. But if you are the one who's making the rules, then all the other people have no idea what you're going to do next, and that is a formula for having people hang on to their money until they figure out what you're going to do. And when a lot of people hang on to their money, you can get results such as you got during the Great Depression of the 1930s. So if this is just a set of short-run ploys for various limited, uh, objectives, limited in time, fine, maybe. But if, if this is going to be the policy for full long years, that you're going to try this, you're going to try that, you're going to try something else, a lot of people are going to wait.
Uh, I think what happened in the stock market recently, when things came down, uh, substantially, for, for, for quite a while, and I note that various people are holding on to their, to their money, uh, before they do anything because they don't know where this is going to lead. Okay, first I want to make note: he is 94 years old, and he's still sharp as a tack, and he's still got it. And again, we're working on that interview, so stay tuned on that. We'll probably go up to Stanford and do that. Um, he's making an interesting point there. What you don't want to do is set off a worldwide trade war, right? So you suddenly rejigger the entire system, right? And you start charging people different things, and you rip up all these deals, and then what happens is everybody, every country could basically be like, okay, we're not doing trade anymore; we're going to do everything ourselves. And then you, you upend the way that we've been operating, sort of post-World War II, right? Like that is an argument you can make. The question here is, is this just the bump that Trump and Elon talked about? We're going to try to make things a little bit fairer, and then if we make things a little bit fairer, which again, already several countries have just completely removed their tariffs altogether because Trump did this, then we'll be able to produce things here in the United States again, right? We're a consumption economy; we don't really produce things. We used to have steel factories and things like that. Now we outsource everything. Everything you buy says "Made in China" on it; there is a reason for that. So that's Sowell's opinion on that, what could happen; that's a little bit counter to what, certainly what Trump's been laying out, and what I've been laying out here.