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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how the markets were roiled as we all realized Donald Trump was actually going to go through with it. Their math wasn't math-ing as they came up with a ridiculous formula for each country, and the gross incompetence continues. Wisconsin elected a new Supreme Court justice and it just might have led to the beginning of Elon Musk's departure in an official role at the White House. Meanwhile, Senator Corey Booker made a stand on the Senate floor, eclipsing the record for longest speech and perhaps dropping a gauntlet for the Democrats
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Hey everybody, welcome to The Weekender edition of the McCrick Podcast.
I'm Jerry J. Saxton.
I'm here with Nick Hausman.
Nick, there is no rest for the weary.
I wish I could say anything other than laugh and giggle at that what you said.
I, you know, we keep saying it and I'm always shocked by it because when we do The Weekender, it's not like we ever like go easier, you know, for the Friday episode.
We still cover the news, we still go into all of it, but every single episode at this point is so jam-packed by history, culture and political changing news.
And here we are on another Friday and we have to talk about just wild shit across the board.
Well, by the way, it's not Friday Newsoms anymore.
It's like Saturday now and they've moved it all over the place to hide it as much as they can.
Sunday's not safe now!
Yeah, there's no there's no day that's safe in that week anymore.
All right, everybody.
Well, welcome to The Weekender.
Reminder, go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Become a patron, gain full access to our episodes.
You're already listening to the previews, and let me tell you something.
This episode is full.
We're talking about the meltdown, the intentional meltdown of the global economy.
We're talking about results in Wisconsin, the possibility of Elon Musk leaving the government.
We're talking about people, another oopsie-doopsie.
situation that, you know, we've started talking about now.
A person being sent to an El Salvador prison and the government just shrugging.
And of course, as everybody is waiting to hear from us, we are going to react to Cory Booker's historic speech within the Senate.
So there's patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Nick, you know, whenever we talk about all this stuff, we spend a lot of time talking about what things are coming down the road.
The Pike, right?
Like one of the aspects of this show is looking at history, looking at the current moment, paying attention to all of the signals and all of the things that we know and that we've experienced and we've sort of trained ourselves to look for.
We knew that something like, quote unquote, Liberation Day was going to happen.
We knew that eventually Trump was going to go ahead and pull this trigger that a lot of people didn't expect he would pull because of the results we'll talk about in just a second.
But on Wednesday, Termed Liberation Day, President Donald Trump announced global tariffs starting at 10% for every country around the world except for, um, is there any country I'm missing here?
I think Afghanistan got a pass.
I think Russia got a pass, but that's neither here nor there.
With a bunch of different gradients for different countries, the European Union is enjoying 20% tariffs.
Japan, 24%.
Vietnam, where we get a lot of our goods from at this point, 46%.
34% was put on China, which brings it to a grand total of 54% on tariffs from China.
Goods from China.
Let's go ahead.
Oh, and by the way, just because we're going through some uninhabited islands where literally nothing is imported from and no one lives there.
So that's great.
Penguins are evil.
I've always liked penguins.
I'm a big fan of Penguins.
But before we get into the fallout and the analysis from all this, Nick, let's hear from the Commander-in-Chief himself announcing his decisions on Liberation Day.
Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.
Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy.
It would have been a much different story.
They tried to bring back tariffs to save our economy.
But it was gone.
It was gone.
It was too late.
Nothing could have been done.
Took years and years to get out of that depression.
Far longer than even FDR had that office right over there for a long period of time.
Oh boy.
Man, it's really something to hear this guy struggle through talking through his agenda.
And that he doesn't understand in any way, shape, or form.
At all.
I mean, yes, and he's actually reading from the teleprompter, because you can tell when he's reading, when he's riffing.
Although I think he might have added a little of all mankind in there on his own.
But yeah, somebody in his office, and this is what makes you think that they're actually, this is somebody else, not just Trump, you know, pretending to be smart about the economy.
But I think we had some pretty good reasons for going away from tariffs back then.
Yeah, yeah, and we'll talk about what those reasons are this sort of weird revisionism of Going back to some sort of a past protectionist Country which had its own problems and had its own issues.
There's a reason we moved away from it.
I do think that By the way, that mentioning income tax is not a coincidence.
You know, one of the things that we've talked about a lot while looking at Donald Trump and analyzing what it is that he does and why he does it.
One thing that we've learned, Nick, is that he doesn't mention things by accident.
Outside of Andrew Lloyd Webber or, you know, other sort of figures that have sort of floated through his miasma of culture.
Right? He'll say that and it's like when people are rich and they don't have no sense of like what other people might be dealing with and what that means and how they have to live, then they will they would believe something like that.
And so this is sort of more though on those lines where the you know, tariffs that would increase prices don't affect rich people at all.
But it certainly is going to affect middle and lower class people.
It probably is the point where they'll just it just destroys the middle class at all completely.
Yeah, and it's almost like that has been intentional for a very long time, and we're finally seeing the final demolition of those things.
Well, Nick, this strategy, which I've taken seriously for years now, that something like this was coming down the line, and I'll tell you why, and that's because I've read the people's papers.
I've listened to them talk.
I've heard them talk about their plans.
And there are reasons for this.
I knew that it was coming.
I knew that there was going to be a disruption like this.
But it still caught a lot of people off guard because they believed that this action was so damaging that Donald Trump wouldn't do it.
Well, almost immediately, we saw futures take a massive tumble.
In the off-hour trading hours.
Then we looked around the global markets.
They took a massive shock because, much like a bypass machine, the United States of America, with its capture of global capitalism and capitalism writ large, was the beating heart of this thing.
And so they disrupted a system that has been in place for a while now.
We watched those markets slip.
Today, the stock market within the United States of America took a hell of a dive.
This is not expert analysis.
I don't think it liked it.
I think it's a lot like looking at a baby taking a bite out of a lemon.
And we watched almost immediately 4% of the stock market go away.
Trillions of dollars in our 401ks were absolutely sacrificed at the feet of this thing.
And let's hear how Trump thinks things are going.
Trump, the markets today are way down, but we're staying here because of the terror.
So how can...
I think it's going very well.
It was an operation like what a patient gets operated on and it's a big thing.
I said this would exactly be the way it is.
We have six or seven trillion dollars coming into our country and we've never seen anything like it.
The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom, and the rest of the world wants to see is there any way they can make a deal.
They've taken advantage of us for many, many years.
For many years we've been at the wrong side of the ball, and I'll tell you what, I think it's going to be unbelievable.
The operation was a success.
The patient died.
Yeah, listen, we had a feeling that the patient was going to die, but you know, at least we learned some things from this and we got rich.
The bill still comes due.
The explanation for all of this, and we'll talk again about why this is actually happening in just a moment, the explanation that was given by the White House was a pretty interesting little calculation that has been making the rounds today.
And here are some reactions from people who were given And when you look at this, on the reciprocal tariffs themselves, how did you come up with the calculation, essentially, in terms of what this looks like for each country?
Because obviously we're looking at the numbers here.
There are different ones.
And I can see some of the countries disputing some of these reciprocal tariffs, saying that's not actually what we charge.
What would your response to that be?
Well, I can tell you, USTR has the volumes of data, and they've been doing it a long time.
And all this will probably be challenged in court.
And I think that USTR, in Trump's first administration, won over 4,000 lawsuits.
So I think the data is very robust.
So you expect that if there are any legal challenges, that the administration would be successful?
I think...
The data is very robust.
You know, Nick, in the future when I don't want to give a straight answer to something and I don't really want to talk about my understanding of it, I'm just going to simply say the data is robust.
Yes, that's always a great way.
I would recommend that.
It's very useful.
It helps that even the administration itself, the people who are tasked with this, do not understand exactly what has happened here, which I think is in part due to the addled nature of Donald Trump and the fact that a lot of them are not aware of why these things are happening in the first place. All right.
And that was Scott Bessent.
I'm not sure if we even identified him as our Treasury Secretary, but he's been saying a lot of things about, I don't know, I'm not sure, I don't know what's going to happen.
And it's, you know, the exact opposite of the appropriate answer he's supposed to give.
But we do need to talk a little bit about how they arrived at these tariff rates, these percentages.
Trump presents this small, you know, billboard that he wants everyone to be able to read.
Well, it's very large, but the things are very small, which is great.
Yeah, right.
I mean, yeah, usually it'd be bigger if you were going to read it from, you know, 20 feet away, you couldn't read it.
But the point being is everyone was scratching their head when you saw things like, you know, Vietnam reciprocal tariff at 90%.
And then finally, we had somebody, James, whatever, I forgot who did it, kind of did the reverse math of this and discovered that they took the trade deficits and divided that by two.
They did the trade deficit from what we trade for one country into what they trade back, divide it by two, and that becomes a percentage they use to then levy a tariff.
And I got news for you, Jared.
Doing that number, of which the economists that I've spoken to, there's no word for this calculation.
This is a made-up thing.
It doesn't represent anything of a real number, and it has nothing to do with tariffs, the tariff rate, and the retaliatory aspect of this thing.
This is simply trade deficit measurement, and that's not what the point of this whole thing was supposed to be.
You know what's funny about this, Nick, and I'm glad you, I've talked to some economists as well, and I think some of the people listening to this show need to be clued in to something, which is economists study within the realm of the economy that we have, right? So when you go to school and when you're studying this and when you get trained, what you're learning is how the present neoliberal global structure works.
Right? Because you are being taught how to be a steward of that.
How to teach other people to be stewards of that.
How to protect that.
What's actually occurring here has nothing to do with that formula.
It actually has nothing to do with the trade deficit.
What we're looking at right now is a radical transformation.
And effectively what is occurring is what I've been screaming about for years, which is they want to take control of the neoliberal global structure.
They want to change the deals that are taking place and use it for their own power and their own profit.
So here's the thing.
Vietnam, again, 46% tariff on Vietnam.
If you have ever looked at like a shirt or an article of clothing, chances are that Vietnam might be on that tag.
Correct? Yeah.
Yeah, pretty regular occurrence, right?
For sure.
Okay, so what happens when you watch the price of those articles of clothing go up?
You're going to pay that until you have an alternative, correct?
Correct. Okay, so this leads to a crisis, which is where people aren't going to be able to afford this.
They have created a situation where they have to respond to it now.
So if we're not going to be importing these goods from the places that we've relied on in the past, and by the way, there is a bargaining tool here, and Donald Trump loves that.
That's one of the ways that they sell this to him, which is, you're going to have these people by the short hairs, and we're going to see who comes to the table and makes deals, and we'll get some of these people to work within alignment, and we'll go back up to the top of the system, right?
But for the other things, the places where they're not going to work, they're not going to play ball, you have to create those goods.
And do we currently have the infrastructure to create those goods?
We currently do not.
Do we have anything even approaching the infrastructure to create those goods?
I mean, they're thinking about robots.
They are most definitely thinking about robots, and that plays into a large part of this.
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