April 17, 2025 - Epoch Times
03:06
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Xi Jinping is perfectly capable of taking China off the cliff. | |
| And so, yeah, you know, he says he won't be bullied. | |
| He says he's not going to talk to us until we come begging. | |
| So, I don't know. | |
| But this is not going to be a good story for China. | |
| Because remember, our economy is much bigger than theirs. | |
| Even with their inflated gross domestic product reports, their economy is less than two-thirds the size of ours. | |
| Last year, China ran an enormous merchandise trade surplus against us, $295.4 billion, which was 5.8% bigger than the merchandise trade surplus in 2023. | |
| I mean, they've got everything to lose. | |
| Now, they can retaliate, as they've done with the rare-earth export ban. | |
| But, you know, they tried that against Japan in 2010. | |
| It didn't work. | |
| China collapsed in a couple months. | |
| You know, they can tell Boeing we're not accepting deliveries of planes. | |
| But if President Trump says if he prohibits Boeing from selling planes and replacement parts, there are going to be a lot of planes in China not flying. | |
| So, you know, we have the power. | |
| The only way China wins this trade war is if it gets Trump to preemptively surrender. | |
| Now, Trump knows he holds the high cards. | |
| But the question is, and a lot of people say, well, you know, we're a democracy. | |
| We've got to give up. | |
| I don't think so, because Trump actually believes in these tariffs. | |
| He knows how important it is. | |
| But that's China's only route out of this. | |
| So one of the biggest, I guess, criticisms that I hear often is that these tariffs, the cost of the increased goods, good cost, is going to be transferred to the consumer. | |
| And how do you view that? | |
| Well, we actually have an experiment, and that was 2018 when Trump imposed 25% tariffs on China. | |
| We know that China absorbed at least 75% to 81% of the cost of those tariffs. | |
| The American consumer didn't feel it. | |
| And by the way, we tend to think of tariffs as a bilateral matter. | |
| When we impose tariffs on China, we think in binary terms, U.S. and China. | |
| But we've got to remember that when we impose tariffs on China... | |
| Companies move supply chains and production out of China to areas which are lower tariffed. | |
| So, yeah, we didn't feel it in 2018. | |
| Now's a different situation. | |
| But I think that if Trump is able to do what I think he can do, which is stitch up these trade deals with other countries, we're going to see a redirection of trade and the American consumers just not going to feel it. | |
| But there's a more important point. | |
| For decades, American presidents have pursued deeply injurious trade policies with China. | |
| And we're going to have to pay some cost. | |
| I think that's inevitable. | |
| I don't think the cost is going to be as great as all the smart people in New York and Washington think. | |
| But even if it is, this is a cost we have to pay. | |
| Because if we don't pay this cost, we become a vassal state of China. |
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