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April 17, 2025 - Lionel Nation
29:22
TRUMP’S TARIFF MASTERPLAN: How He Outsmarted China and Saved the U.S. Economy From Total Collapse!
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Well, it's that time, sports fans.
Bob Kudla joins us from TradeWithLionel.com, also called Trade Genius, but we call it TradeWithLionel.com.
Bob, since we talked last time, what's happening?
Make us smarter.
Well, all hell broke loose with Trump and the tariffs.
So, first of all, from a macro standpoint, this is medicine we need to take.
But it's a detox that'll take about two years to work its way through the system.
And so, basically, the chemotherapy is applying.
We just hope it doesn't kill the patient or kill his political aspirations before he can get the jobs rolling in.
But it looks like he's defensively.
That's okay.
You look fine.
You look fine.
No, no, no, no.
You're spot on, please.
Keep going.
Keep going.
Oh, no.
So I just started looking at myself.
It was like weird.
So he's doing a lot of what's called push-pull right now.
He went ahead and, you know, as a good negotiator and you as a former litigator know, you know, he asked for the moon, right, to get what you actually want.
And he also, when you do those kind of things, you actually see who's going to blink, right, who might panic into a bad deal or a good deal for you.
And I think he now, you know, got a sense for...
And I think a lot of people were taking him for granted and saying, oh, this is just Trump negotiating.
And then he went ahead and he dropped the bomb last, whatever it was, last Tuesday or Monday, where it sent the market reeling.
And so now he has a baseline of tariffs across the world, which he didn't have before.
And now he's going to start to do game theory against China.
Look, China is the ultimate target here.
They're the only ones that really threaten the what I would call the world order, if you will, of capitalism.
Because if not, if we had the Chinese world order, it would just be a series of corrupt nations, you know, dealing with each other.
And the people be damned.
And so the world better hope Trump wins.
And so what they're doing now is he's deli slicing across the board saying, hey, he's forcing the Chinese either to blink or...
He's not going to accept the transshipments, you know, stamps at the game they played, you know, before.
Now everybody has to pay a tariff.
And so I think it's a really good thing.
And the other thing he's doing, too, is he's spreading out the tax base in the United States.
Look, you know, with all the...
Everybody talks about making the tax code, you know, progressive.
But at the end of the day, there's not enough rich people.
And so when you do these tariffs, you actually apply a regressive tax, but it's a tax that's paid on the exporter more than it is on the consumer.
And you're going to see that because these countries that export to the United States are mercantilistic in nature, and they'll eat margin to maintain market share.
And we're already seeing that, actually.
Trump was out today.
Saying prices are falling and tariff revenue is up.
So what we're doing at the moment seems to be working.
Now, would you have...
There's Bob Kudla, the investment guru genius.
Bob Kudla, the American.
If you were in my cabinet and you were in terms, if you were my besant or whoever, would you have advised me?
Would you have done this?
Yeah, I mean, the only difference between me and Trump is that I tend to not try to insult people as I'm negotiating with them.
And so, you know, some of that's acting and all that stuff, too.
You heard Bill Maher.
But I would just be a little bit...
You know, it's okay to tell the American people, look, you're getting ripped off, but I would be a little bit more, you know, the puppy dog approach, saying, guys, I'd love to keep it the way it is, but we certainly just can't maintain this anymore.
The United States will not survive.
And so, as much as I love you guys and I want to keep the status quo, these are the changes that will be made.
It's not even a negotiation.
This is what will happen.
And, you know, I trust you understand because you guys actually do it to us.
Well, you know, but you see, you bring up a good point, Bob.
There is something called diplomacy.
And I know that may not be a word that one normally thinks.
When Marco Rubio sat down with Lavrov and basically said, you're going to do this, and Lavrov said, wait a minute, we're winning.
Why do we want to cease fire?
Do you understand what's happening here?
It's as though sometimes we play this American hubristic approach.
We don't realize, wait a minute, that's not the way this thing works.
Not with these people.
It's almost like we're playing to Fox News, perhaps, maybe too much.
I don't know if it matters in the long run.
I mean, look, I know some of the stuff is, you know, because everything's clickbait right now.
That's why Trump's over the top.
That's why everybody's over the top, because you can't get through the noise.
You know, regarding Russia, Russia's actually pretty fragile, too.
You know, you have to define winning, right?
You know, there's one thing about destroying Ukraine militarily.
It's a whole other thing about destroying Ukraine entity.
I mean, Russia could be losing troops for the next 25 or 30 years, you know, with the just the guerrilla warfare that Ukraine and look, Ukraine has already shown Russia.
They have the ability to strike in Moscow.
So it would just be it would just be a holy mess, you know.
And so Russia can't bleed out, too.
And they have to worry about what's happening to their east because, you know, China's obviously very interested in in Siberian and Siberian materials.
Right.
So.
And it's the United States' best interest for Russia.
Ukraine's a sideshow.
We need Russian medals.
And we need Russian rare earths.
And we need Ukraine rare earths.
So Trump's like saying, this war is distracting me from my economic growth or protection.
And I'm going to end the war.
And if I have to throw Ukraine overboard to get it...
I'll throw Ukraine overboard to get it.
I'll give Russia...
But Bob, if we had been Russia, or if it was reversed, and China decided to pull a Russia through NATO on our southern border, we would have done exactly the same thing.
We act like we don't know what Russia did.
I mean, this is not just, you know, naked aggression.
And I've got to ask this question.
And by the way, we speak of this, which I find fascinating, only in terms...
By the way, how you throw your voice during that dog thing is incredible.
You are a great ventriloquist.
Your mouth doesn't even move when we hear the dog.
I kid, of course.
The thing is, is that what happens with the Middle East?
What happens if somehow we draw Iran into this?
Iran also said to Russia, it's been threatened, that Russia would go to the side of Iran.
What's happening there?
We don't want to talk about it.
Yeah, you know, Iran is the most...
Look, there's three hotspots in the world, right?
There's China, Taiwan, there's Iran versus the Sunnis, and then there's Russia and Ukraine.
I think Russia and Ukraine is going to resolve itself.
Iran is extremely...
Look, Iran is one asset, right?
All they have is oil.
And it can be taken out at any moment in time, right?
And I think, you know, China's the same way with Russia.
China could probably overwhelm Taiwan if they threw enough resources at it.
But at what cost?
You know, remember, Taiwan has 10,000 missiles and probably 9,999 of them are aimed at the Three Gorges Dam, okay?
And you take that dam out.
Okay, you're displacing 400 million Chinese in that valley, okay, number one, and you're probably killing between 20 and 40 million of them.
And so, and you basically split the country in half.
And so, you know, China has to know that, that they're fragile too.
And so I think there's a lot of rhetoric being thrown around.
Now, if we're closer to the end of the world, then the Russia-Iranian pivot makes sense, because that's Ezekiel 38. Basically, Russia gets dragged into a war with Iran and others to attack and basically take Israel out.
But until then, I just see that Trump will calm all these guys down.
Because at the end of the day, Nobody's in a really powerful position.
And what's so funny is the United States used to be in a very weak position, but we're in a surprisingly strong position.
Look, you know, our relationship with Saudi Arabia, we keep oil prices down in the low 60s.
Iran and Russia have no extra money to fund their governments, okay?
It's impossible.
And if push comes to shove, they can shove oil down even further.
Does it at all alarm you with the Houthis, with the Strait of Hormuz, and when Iran can get back, and if they decide that they're going to block off the Red Sea, you're saying that doesn't bother you?
No.
We're bombing the Houthis back into the Stone Age right now.
They only have so many strategic weapons, and we're taking them out and out every day.
So I think that's going to be passe here pretty soon.
Look, and if things get really bad, you know, we can block the state of Hermes against Iran, right?
You know, Card Island, you just make a phone call and you tell the people, don't come to work on Sunday.
Your facility will be gone by the time Monday morning rolls around.
You know, and then Russia, I mean, Iran can't export any oil at all.
And how long does that nation last?
See, it goes to show you, it's a, you know, an artery works both ways.
It's not just, it's not a one size.
You see, Bob Kudlow, how many people do we talk?
See, everybody would think, oh, this is just some investment guy.
But your knowledge of the world is encyclopedic, and that also bears into and folds into investment strategizing as well.
So what does one do?
Knowing what you know now and observing what's happening in the world, and if somebody were to call, tradewithlionel.com.
Do you incorporate this into investment strategies for success?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, there's certain things that are just immutable.
And so you have to know kind of where oil is heading because it affects a lot of other downstream, you know, asset classes.
But we've been following an analogy, an analog, if you will, that of 2000, 2002.
We think that one's holding, is that where tech rolls over.
And then commodities get their run.
And ironically, in 2000, 2002, tech rolled over.
Uranium ran.
Gold ran.
Oil ran.
So that's the theme that I'm staying with.
And if you notice, you know, you have uranium running.
You have rare earths running.
You have oil.
Once oil gets down in the upper 50s, it'll always push up.
We've had great trades last week.
Every time oil got in the 50s, we give people trades for it to bounce up, to bounce up, bounce up.
It's almost impossible to get any lower than that.
Not enough inventory out there.
And then gold.
Look at gold.
Gold's running.
And there's a reason for gold.
I think we might have talked about this last month, if not, is that Trump can reprice the value of the gold.
In Fort Knox.
He could take that revaluation and apply it to the Treasury and basically get a credit to his account.
It's almost a trillion dollars upside.
So that's a trillion dollars in the Treasury to do whatever he wants with it.
He could pay the bonds off with it.
He could create a sovereign wealth fund.
He could do a lot of different things with that money.
So you combine that with You know, taking a trillion out with Doge, a trillion out with gold, a trillion dollars with tariffs, and now he has two to three trillion dollars here to basically balance the budget next year.
And so all his hand-wringing about the treasuries will go away in a heartbeat once that starts to manifest.
Whatever happened last time when they were talking about auditing the Fed to see how much gold is there, whether it's been hypothecated, whether it's ours?
You know, because you do notice that we have a three-day news story, and then we just forget about it.
We move on to the next.
Whatever happened with Doge?
Are we making any inroads?
Yeah, all of them.
Yeah, Doge is on its path.
Look, they discovered massive fraud right now, so they're going into the next budgeting season.
You know, we're going to have a trillion-dollar run rate less in our budget than we had this year, just because people were just not paying anymore.
You know, the auditing of the Fed, forget about rehypothecating gold.
What they say, if it's not in your Fort Knox, it's not yours.
So anybody and their brother can make a claim to American gold in Fort Knox, and Trump will say, well, just come and get it.
Right.
Come and get it.
It's mine.
So I don't worry about hypothecation of something you have control over.
He'll reprice that.
People don't get it.
That's already happened twice, Lionel.
So you have a situation where Roosevelt did it, and I think Truman did it, or Eisenhower, and they took that money and put it in the Treasury and spent it.
And so Trump could do that and just, you know, basically...
China and Japan own $1.8 trillion worth of our bonds, okay?
They're not going to sell all of them anyway, but we could just literally take a trillion dollars off of it right off the top.
Trump could literally just take a trillion dollars of it right off the top, just apply it right to it, and then, you know, all of a sudden now you're going four, five, six months without a bond market, a bond auction.
Well, that's going to drive the price down, and then Trump can re...
That $9 trillion turd that Janet Yellen left them.
So we incorporate all that into our thinking, but our main view remains the same.
It is not a 1929 event at all.
People totally don't understand tariffs with a country that has a trade deficit.
Look at Great Britain.
Do me a favor.
I know this sounds great.
Explain this.
Explain very quickly what a trade deficit is because we use these terms all the time in the tariff.
What does this mean?
Let's take China.
China's the best one because people say, I can't stand China.
I don't know why.
I know they steal our stuff and sell us cheap crap and they take our jobs, but I don't understand what a trade deficit is.
Explain this very quickly.
Well, a trade deficit is that you're giving me more than I give you in exchange for your currencies.
So, China?
China has been providing us more goods than we can provide China.
So you get a deficit from that.
And so the way they've been counteracting it is China's been buying our treasuries.
But at some point, they don't do that.
It affects our currency.
And then our currency has to fall then to start balancing it out.
But China as a supplier is not just simply that they have something that we need that we can't provide them.
China's also de-industrializing us.
What is that?
I'll take the steel industry, for example.
China will come in and offer steel to our manufacturers far less than we can produce it locally.
By hook or by crook or by cheap labor.
Once you destroy that industry in the United States, you just can't turn it back on.
It's trillions of dollars to rebuild everything back up again.
Once they destroy it, they own the market.
And that's what they do.
And then stealing them intellectual property is the other thing that they do.
So those three things are a problem as China goes.
But the more important thing is what you hear in the news is that the United States in 1929, we did smooth Harley and it caused the Great Depression.
Well, people need to understand we're China of 1929.
China is the United States of 1929.
We're Great Britain of 1929.
The British did not feel the Great Depression.
The United States did.
Because we were the world's biggest creditor.
We owned other people's bonds and we sold more things than we took in.
Okay?
And so when it reverses the other way is we're still going to be consuming here in the United States, but the jobs come back here.
Who's in big trouble is China.
In lesser extent, Germany.
Lesser extent, Korea and Japan.
Those are the people that are most affected by tariffs.
Not the debtor nation.
The debtor nation actually benefits from a tariff.
And then once you create that fortress America, you create velocity, which creates inflation.
So you can forget about deflation.
Okay?
All this stuff is hand-wringing by people that are losing a lot of money because they were making a lot of money before arbitraging wages and arbitraging intellectual property theft, arbitraging the environmental stuff, yada, yada, yada.
So now those are the people screaming.
There's people that had their hand out are getting it chopped off, and they're trying to scare the American people into making Trump back off.
The problem is the American people aren't seeing any of the downside to this.
They're seeing 16% less oil.
They're seeing other egg prices go down.
They're not losing jobs.
They're not seeing their friends lose jobs.
The people losing jobs are a million and a half people in the big liberal cities that were making between $200,000 and $500,000 a year sucking on NGO money.
Those people are gone.
I told people I wanted to know in my room, I said, tell me anybody you know that loses their job.
Because of Trump directly.
I want to know.
See, you say that's so interesting.
I think nobody understood, in my humble opinion, the amount of surface, this latticework.
You call it NGO, USAID, just generically.
We didn't know what was there.
They were just not printing money.
They were just printing zeros and ones.
They were saying, okay, you're political.
You got a million.
You got 10 million.
You got five.
I can do everything from Hollywood to the entertainment industry to you name it.
I can prop this thing up in so many ways because there's just no end to it.
And then all of a sudden, Doge came in and the spirit of Doge.
And I don't think Elon's gone at all.
He might not physically be there, but he's enjoying too much of this.
And then all of a sudden, once they pulled that support out, that foundation, they realized, oh my God, it's supported.
Everything.
It's like when you have a root system and you cut this root and that tree dies over there.
You didn't know that.
So I don't think they knew what was propping up their...
Well, a lot of money went overseas.
So overseas and it came back as slush funds.
Look, they're going to defund the left this way too.
So it's really interesting.
But my point is that the American people aren't going to see the downside to this, just the American elites.
And Trump, he already made a decision.
Look, I'm a populist, so I'll side with the people over the markets.
Because, you know, he's going to create the foot soldiers.
And so, yeah, so it's going to be interesting.
So that's what I think is going to happen.
You know, there's a timing mismatch on these things.
Will we go into a recession?
Good possibility that we will.
You know, real estate wouldn't be a place I'd put money because...
People are getting older.
They're not buying more homes.
They're not moving up.
They're actually moving into assisted care facilities.
And they have to sell their properties.
And that's just going to cause basically a supply glut.
So the only game in town really is going to be the stock market.
And it's going to be the commodities.
They've been underinvested.
So you're just going to make money.
A different way.
And if everything does go into recession, then there's the bond market.
The yields will fall because people will be scared they'll run into the bond market.
So what I always tell people, there's always a bull market somewhere.
You just have to make sure that you're paying attention enough to get your money moved over.
Now, you can't help Trump dropping Trump bombs everywhere.
That's just the way it goes.
But you just try to understand his strategy, then things make sense.
So, by the way, last word, crypto.
How's that doing?
It's doing well.
So Bitcoin and gold are the off-ramps to this disturbance.
And so if you notice, like today we're talking, the market was down because of the NVIDIA news on not being able to export.
But gold was up and Bitcoin was up.
The market was down.
So we're seeing that.
And actually, oil is up today, too.
So we're seeing the shift to what I call the safe havens.
You know, people are going to run out of the financialization market, which is just the general stock market, and they're going to buy companies in the stock market that have hard assets.
And that's what we're seeing.
And crypto is a hard asset, by the way.
You may not be able to see it, but it's rare, right?
And the supply is limited.
So it's doing good.
We expect it, look, we expect it, you know, ebb and flow, but it's holding up on these shocks.
So, Bob Kudlow, right now somebody watching us wants to go to TradeWithLionel.com or call 800-949-1408.
What do they get?
What do they do?
Yeah, so there's, you know, we have two levels of service.
We have what we call more the basic, where...
You get access to the chat room, you get access to our algorithms, and you get trades I put out every day.
And if you go to the upper tier, it's actually called the VIP voice room, where you and I are talking now.
You don't see my pretty face, but you get my voice.
And some people can ask questions all day.
Myself, I have a couple other people that are in the room, too, that can answer questions.
But then you get the algorithm, you get the trades, and you get the chat room, and you get voice room.
So it's a bargain what we offer.
We price it very well, and we try to make sure that the ROI is in your favor.
And when we were waiting to get on, talking this morning in the VFP voice room, we put a trade on, and for a $30,000 investment, we made $500 in 20 minutes, and then we're back out of it.
So you can't beat that ROI.
And so, and that's pretty much, you know, half the cost of the years of the, and we do this every single day.
You know, I've been doing this trade now since September, October, trading either long or short micro strategy, which is tied to Bitcoin.
There's two instruments that you trade and you day trade it.
And I basically paid off a brand new Toyota Tacoma and I paid off a brand new Lexus.
You know, hybrid.
So just by banging on it every single day.
And so we teach people how to do that.
And obviously your results vary because you may not be put as much money in as I do.
But I try to help people look at you can make between $200 and $500 a day.
That's $40,000 to $120,000 a year.
I think that's good living.
And we teach you good principles and how to...
How to make these trades and how to not make dumb trades.
And that's what our algorithm helps with.
So that's what we do.
And we only care the more volatile the market, the better it is for us because our algorithm could find trades even easier in an environment that's unstable versus a stable environment where it doesn't move as much, where you can get...
You get stocked out too easily.
Here, when you have these stark moves down, they make for easy trades to pop up, even if it's short term, enough for you to make money and hop off.
So, what we do is go to TradeWithLionel.com or call 800-949-1408 and tell them that you saw Bob and Lionel for that super-duper special special, whatever you...
Whatever the particular nomenclature is, but make sure you tell people you saw us because that's how we work.
We help you.
You help us.
And people have been enjoying our chats more and more because this is just not a plain old, not that there's anything wrong with it, a financial or investment discussion.
It's about the world.
It's about the news.
And it's always interesting, Bob Kudlow.
And I thank you, my friend.
Thank you so much for your expertise and your wisdom.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
Let me pitch the service, too.
And guys, you know, in a lot of stress, there's a lot of opportunities.
So always have a positive outlook.
Indeed.
Bob Kudlop, thank you, my friend.
All the very best.
Thank you.
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