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April 9, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:37
China Strikes Back: Where Will Tit-For-Tat Tariffs Lead?

The Chinese government has vowed to not back down in the face of President Trump's ratcheting up of tariffs on top US trading partner. With tariffs of 104 percent and 84 percent respectively, how far will this spat between US and China go...and what can consumers expect? Also today, Netanyahu urges Trump to blow up all of Iran's nuclear facilities...it will be easy he claims.

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Trade War Imbalance 00:10:56
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this?
Good.
I have a job for you.
Uh-oh.
Settle two wars going on.
You know, it looks like it's two wars at one time.
You know, they wondered whether there'd be a trade war.
And I think it's safe to say that there is, even though I think most people who understood Austrian economics realized that that was inevitable, just like they were Austrians who could understand why there would be bubbles and recessions and depressions.
Now they have other reasons why there's moving into a depression.
But the real reason, of course, is manipulation by the Federal Reserve.
So we have that war going on, but we have a hot war going on.
Just two minor nations, U.S., we have a few weapons that we can use.
And then also the Chinese, they've been working their way up the ladder.
But we're still the kinkpins.
If you never realize it, we're always crying about, you know, how much more money we have to spend on military.
Like yesterday, we talked about the first trillion dollar DOD budget.
And next year, it might be $2 trillion.
And yet that's way over.
They're getting up in numbers.
It can't even come to adding everything else that everybody else spent.
But there is escalation.
There's a lot in the news.
And one article here that I have, U.S.-China bra takes center stage in global trade war.
There certainly has.
It's right up there.
And the numbers are pretty startling.
You know, we have a pretty significant tariffs on China.
Looking for trouble.
Over 100%.
Nobody thinks, well, that's so silly, but it isn't.
It's stupid, I think, more than silly.
And then also, China's trying to keep up, but they're up to 84%.
So I would suggest that it wouldn't take a genius to figure out that that type of talk is going to interfere in trade and the finances and add on to that to the correction necessary for 10, 20 years of misinformation coming from the Federal Reserve.
So there's a lot of debt, a lot of malinvestment, and a lot of inflation out there that has to be dealt with.
And people have gotten nervous.
And when you're now, you know, today, it's not a whole lot better.
Matter of fact, it's not better at all.
They're up, it had been up $6 trillion of lost paper assets.
And so it's still going up.
And it's sort of strange, even with my attendance at the dollar gold ratio.
Now it's $100, you know, that went up $100 in one day.
So that's a sign there's lots of worrying out there and it's going to be sorted out.
And I always look to believing that market forces eventually win out these fights.
You know, you can have a Fed messing up the economy, screwing around with the interest rates, causing weakness here and there.
And then they always adapt.
But eventually the markets rule and they get out of control.
And there's nothing the government can do.
Millions and millions of people participate in the market.
And I think that's what we're seeing.
I think a lot of people are giving up, not only for the economic managers we have, but I think, internationally speaking, that the whole system is is caving in.
So I think we're going to see this chaos for a long time.
I think things are going to get a lot worse and it shouldn't surprise us.
But where the surprise should be is that people who are worried.
If they look carefully, they could find out that the solution is not complicated.
We, it's fully explainable.
But it might be that you have to make some adjustments like uh, living within our, in our means and everybody living in with their meats, rather than think oh, we need money, we'll print it.
We have trade barriers to overdue, we'll just put on tariffs, all that nonsense.
So it's, it's uh, working its way out, but it's not going to be tomorrow everything, it's not going to be hunky-dory.
It seems like there's some jingoism going along here, because they've established the narrative that they're ripping us off.
Now the Chinese are ripping us off, the Europeans are ripping us off, everyone is living high on the hog off of our hard labor and productivity and I think it's, you know, psychologically.
A lot of people who support Trump are accepting that narrative and they're actually cheering on this war because they like it.
We're gonna, we're gonna get those dang Chinese once and for all.
We're gonna slap them some more tariffs.
You know, seems to be the attitude.
You know.
They say that the main thing going on is uh, we're retaliating against a 20-year trade war.
We were unfairly treated.
Yesterday I mentioned about the car people.
The car companies are in shreds because most of their parts come by imports.
Yeah, you know.
So they wonder why they're in trouble, but they're.
But Detroit is once again under the gun because of the interference, uh with uh, with the inflation uh, with the uh with all the regulations that they have.
Uh, they said it's been going on for 20 years.
But I keep thinking of of the dumb stuff.
You know, you know uh, the car business is obviously very clear, cut all the.
You know, I don't know what percent, but it looks like most of the parts are imports.
So all those prices are going up.
How can they deal with that?
But the other one is if uh, I think it's a remnant of mercantilism it's not pure mercantilism, but it is this that you protect everything you, you cling on to your wealth and you expect to sell stuff, but you never expect to buy stuff you know and use up your money.
But uh, I try to use the example of bananas.
You know, there's a there's a trade imbalance with that.
I thought, well, you know, that's right, we buy all our bananas overseas, so there's an imbalance.
I was thinking that people who are the radicals, why don't they suggest building huge greenhouses and grow the bananas in these greenhouses?
They're just thinking how many jobs there would be.
Think about the glass makers and all these people are going to make all this money and we can compete with bananas.
And I can guarantee you something, they could raise bananas, but they will not taste as good if they came from all of us and there'll be probably a dollar each.
Yeah, it seems like there's almost this emotional attachment to a manufacturing America, pre-1980s manufacturing America, that a lot of people are embracing, especially Chump supporters, with the idea that somehow these tariffs will result in them dusting off the factories in Detroit.
They're going to polish up these old abandoned buildings.
They're going to start, you know, steel mills will rise up again and this sort of thing.
And it just doesn't, it doesn't seem realistic.
It's maybe attractive, but it doesn't seem realistic.
Because even, you know, the founders even recognize that tariffs are, you know, something people use.
But if you, if they do that, why this approach here, I consider it bad economics, but I consider it bad diplomacy.
So if you wanted to adjust something, why couldn't they introduce it gradually instead of declaring war?
This is an economic war that was literally declared by our administration.
And that's part of the problem too, because then you get people backed into a corner and they're not, it'll look like who's going to play playing chicken away?
Who's going to capitulate?
And so far, that has not been resolved.
And I keep thinking, they will correct things quickly and all that, but it's going to take a long time to do this because there's been a lot of mistakes.
All the misdirected investments, all the investments because the interest rates are low, all because the prices were all screwed up.
Well, all because we can't have a defined unit of account, and all because we accepted globalism as a certain amount of this.
And then, of course, we took advantage of, and it's coming home to Roost, we took advantage of the fact that we have been the richest country in the world.
We had to make it so that we had the reserve currency of the world and we could throw our weight around.
And it was great for a while, but I think it's coming to an end.
And the other option, which is freedom, is not a complicated fact.
You don't have to have a lot of managers of freedom.
Just leave people alone and they'll figure it out.
Well, here are a couple of things that we're looking at.
You sent this over this morning.
If you put this up, this is the Wall Street Journal's take on it.
U.S.-China brawl takes center stage in global trade war.
20-year trade imbalance between the two economies is at the center of Trump's tariff battle.
And this is from the article.
If you go to the next, Beijing threatened to, quote, fight to the end as President Trump was set early Wednesday morning to bring the total of the tariffs imposed on China in his second term to 104%, as you said, Dr. Paul, with both countries digging in for a protracted fight that lays bare the global economic fault line at the heart of the trade war.
While Trump has dramatically expanded his broadsides over trade to encompass allies and adversaries alike, China remains his foremost target.
This reflects not just the intensifying geopolitical rivalry, but also China's 20 years of growing trade surpluses with the U.S. that Trump has been said have been ruinous for American jobs and industries.
Now, the other article we looked at was from Zero Hedge, and they talked about a white paper that China put out yesterday.
And I think you read about that.
I go to the next clip because, and I won't read much from it, but here's sort of the summary of it.
Trade wars produce no winners and protectionism leads up a blind alley.
The economic successes of both China and the U.S. present shared opportunities rather than mutual threats.
And after that, if you go to the next one, they released this paper.
And then right after that, they announced that they were going to get in the game.
If you go to that next one, 84% tariffs on the U.S. was their reaction.
I think Trump was expecting that they wouldn't react, but in fact, they have.
They've upped the annually now 104 to 84.
Ups And Downs Of Tariffs 00:06:37
Yes.
Know, the amount that we import is tremendous, 400 billion dollars in a year and the tariffs are going to go up on that.
So it's uh, it's something that people don't realize how serious this is.
And uh people, people could keep saying well, it has to be fair, fair trade.
You know we, we don't want this free trade, we want fair trade.
Yeah well, who's going to define fair?
And if uh, I think sometimes uh we, we take a position where, where we, we complain more than we should and we should just go about our business.
But we don't have enough sincere people that understand nor do they want to use a free market because you wouldn't have all the advantages of the deep state.
You wouldn't have the advantages of a monetary system that we have where all you have to have are lobbyists.
And they have a trick they play endlessly.
And that is pass the real debt on to the people, the average people, because the inflation hurts middle class and the poor the most.
And they argue for this case, and then they argue for the benefit of the very rich to get the money first when it still has more value to it.
So this system has a lot of special interests, but it's always pretend.
And you'll hear it now.
Well, I think there was another proposal that they have to raise the minimum wage in order to do that.
Well, the minimum wage hasn't kept up.
But that's not the answer to it.
The answer is just don't stay out of the business of regulating all these prices and get rid of the taxes.
You know, two things, get rid of the Fed and get rid of the IRS.
I think we and just let the people alone.
I'll tell you what, the market would clean up this mess in a hurry.
Yeah, you know, the spokesman for the White House, Carolyn Leavitt, she said yesterday, of course, we can build iPhones in the U.S.
We bring back the production and build them in the U.S.
And that's probably true, but it strikes me, I mean, there's this sort of, you know, sort of faux patriotic jingoism.
Yes, you could do that, but then the iPhone would be what, $2,000 or $3,000.
What American is going to buy it for that price?
The quality would, I'd question the quality, because that's one of the things we hear all the time, just from hearsay, is that the American worker doesn't work as hard as some other people.
And even though they flip them into the hoodlums that come in here and defy our laws and all this, but it's the people who really want to come here.
They have a work ethic.
The work ethic is much stronger by legalized immigrants who have come here just to work because I've met a few come in here legally.
And believe me, they will work hard and they will succeed.
But that's not what we have.
A lot of these people, you know, figure that they can get by.
And if there's a downturn, we get a check.
And if the government tells us that we have to stay in our house for two years because there's a virus out there, we'll send you more money.
It's terrible.
Well, let's turn to our friend Peter Schiff, who, as you've said, is always very consistent and astute on this.
I have a clip of him explaining.
And actually, it's a critique of China's response, which is slightly interesting.
If we can first put it up and I'll read what he says, then we'll listen to what he says.
Everyone says China was strong for retaliating against Trump's tariffs.
But here's the truth.
Tariffs hurt the country that imposes them.
Retaliation made things worse from both sides.
Smart move.
Do nothing.
Trade wars aren't a strength.
They are self-sabotage.
Now, let's listen to him.
He explained that full screen line and let's listen to Peter Schiff explaining it.
I think he makes some good points here.
Foreign markets didn't go down when Trump announced tariffs.
They really went down because China retaliated with tariffs of its own, which is a mistake for China to have made.
I mean, the best thing that you could do in response to tariffs is nothing, because tariffs always do the most harm to the nation that imposes them.
But often, politicians respond in kind either because of ego, they want to act tough, or they follow the interest of a special interest because there are always narrow special interests that benefit from tariffs at the expense of the broader population that suffers.
That's always the problems with democracies.
And I thought maybe China won't have that problem, you know, because it's not a democracy.
And so that should be an advantage in situations like this.
Instead, you know, China imposed these retaliatory tariffs to our retaliatory tariffs.
Foreign.
So, yeah.
You know, isn't he an example of what I was trying to make the point of?
Is it's not complicated.
Yeah.
And he's spoken out there and it was very clear.
And the average person should, you know, understand this.
But he's not respected in the universities.
He's not going to be a visiting professor and get all the professors to come there and listen.
They would excommunicate him or more.
Or worse.
Yeah.
Well, I had a couple of charts just to remind people of these last few days with the tariff war rising.
This is a month.
This is a month of Dow.
We saw something happen in the early part of April here.
You see that big downturn.
Now go to NASDAQ and see that chart.
I'm sure everyone has seen these.
You see a big downturn on the NASDAQ.
Similar curves here on both charts.
How do you read those, Dr. Paul?
What do you say to that here?
Continuing?
I think it will with ups and downs.
You know, yesterday, I guess it was, there were some ups, and today it's back down again.
People have to realize the market does the work and they have to liquidate the mistakes.
And it's just like an individual.
If they made a lot of mistakes in their investments, even though they were making money on it early because the stock they bought, they thought was going to be great and the bubble was there and they made a lot of money.
But to liquidate all that, it has to be either salvaged.
If it's an individual, sometimes they have to work harder.
They have to pay off the debt.
And that's painful.
The politician there is to prevent pain, you know, and pretend that they can take care of the people.
Market Ups and Downs 00:06:56
And the people should.
Well, I think I should say they don't get this asking, but really, you know, Musk and his crew have been asking these questions, you know, that is carried away.
And I think a lot of people have it.
But just think about the anger that he's inside it.
I mean, here are the what they have death threat against Musk.
Yeah.
The guy's a genius.
And all he talked about was getting rid of wasted fraud.
People hate his guns.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Well, the second topic we want to discuss is related.
It may not seem obvious, but it is related.
And that is Netanyahu's visit yesterday to Trump.
Trump again pulled out the chair for Bibi.
Netanyahu says Iran deal would work only if nuclear facilities are quote blown up.
This is from Dave DeCamp and anti-war Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that a U.S. diplomatic deal would work only if Tehran's nuclear facilities are blown up under the supervision of the U.S. Gee, thanks, Bibi.
Terms that would be a non-starter in negotiations with Iran.
Of course.
So here's what Netanyahu said.
We agree that Iran will not have nuclear weapons.
This can be done by agreement, but only if this agreement is Libyan style.
They go in, blow up the installations, dismantle all the equipment under U.S. supervision and carried out by America.
That would be good, he said in a video statement after meeting Trump.
Libya, he wants a Libya model.
Go to the next clip.
This is what DeCamp wrote as Sam article.
Netanyahu's mention of Libya refers to when former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi agreed to dismantle his nuclear weapons program in 2003.
We remember that, Dr. Paul, and allowed inspectors in to verify the progress.
Only eight years later in 2011, Gaddafi was brutally killed by U.S.-backed militants after a NATO airstrike hit his convoy amid a U.S.-NATO bombing campaign.
One last sentence, Dr. Paul.
President Trump previously criticized John Bolton, his former national security advisor, for suggesting a Libya-style model for disarming North Korea.
He said, what would Bolton, one of the dumbest people in Washington, know?
Wasn't he the person who so stupidly said on television, Libyan solution, when describing what the U.S. is going to do in North Korea?
I've got plenty of other Bolton's stupid stories, he said in 2020 in a tweet.
So here we go.
Netanyahu's openly, openly saying we need the Libya option for Iran, i.e., essentially taking, you know, de-weaponizing everything, taking every means they have of defending themselves, and then opening them up to what happened in Libya.
Well, we have to be careful about using the word stupid.
What about suggesting that some of the decisions made recently with Yemen and what we do in foreign policy as unwise, to say the least?
But, you know, if they were looking for a solution, why wouldn't common sense and people who are independent-minded treat both sides the same way?
But they look back at Libya and what was the reward?
You know, you don't trust people that come in like that.
But, you know, maybe the real solution in the Middle East would be for everybody in the region give up nuclear weapons.
I wonder if Netanyahu would entertain a debate on that.
I don't think that would be a big seller there.
Can you imagine?
You know, Trump has said on Saturday, we're going to have direct negotiations with Iran.
I haven't seen the Iranian side confirm that yet.
But if that's what he's claiming, and actually he claimed it live, and I don't know if you saw it in a press conference with Netanyahu, and you can see Netanyahu's face sink.
Like, he doesn't want that to happen.
He doesn't want the U.S. to talk to Iran.
He just wants us to bomb them.
So how are you going to have negotiations when this is a starting point?
We're going to blow up all your stuff.
How's that sound?
You know, they're going to say, oh, okay, that sounds all right.
Yeah, but you know, it has to be more than just our group of people who look at the foreign policy and all the way we do.
And then look back and just compare the speeches given.
You know, I'm going to have stop wars and not start any new ones.
Well, he's still looking for a real stoppage because nobody totally stops.
We stop when we have enough CIA agents running the show, you know, and we remain there.
I mean, like, have we really left Iraq?
And, you know, and these countries were very much involved.
We're still very much involved in Syria.
And even though I think the pretense is that he's going to be able to, you know, bring everlasting peace to Ukraine.
Well, that's not going to happen, I don't think.
But it would be great if he could.
But and then at the same time, the inconsistency that bothers a lot of people is, is this stuff in Yemen?
And when you read the stories and the children, I mean, where is their heart?
Well, the whole thing, the whole approach to Russia and Ukraine is unrealistic.
The U.S. is saying, okay, both you guys, unilateral ceasefire, both of you guys.
Well, Russia's winning the war.
And it says, well, we still have issues.
The reason why we started the war haven't been addressed.
No, you guys are just supposed to stop shooting.
That's like, I was on a show last week where I said, that's like you're in the fourth quarter and you're up by 30 points.
And they say, why don't we just call it here and we call it a tie?
You know, it doesn't work that way.
That's not how the game works, you know, whether you like it or not.
But then the question goes back to where the controversy is.
Yeah, but Russia started all this.
It all was Russia's fault.
And we had agreements and they broke the agreements and they won't look at the responsibility of NATO and the United States.
How many weapons were used to kill a lot of different people, Ukrainians, Russians, and all that?
The money came out of the pockets of the American people.
But it's hard for the people to visualize it, I guess.
Oh, what is it?
$2 billion that they're going to have.
No, it was a billion dollars to have that bombing run on Yemen.
Yeah.
First three weeks, a billion dollars.
A billion dollars.
Yeah, just gone.
Gone with the wind.
Well, on the same topic, if I can put up that next clip.
Now, if you don't go to ronpaulinstitute.org every day, you should, because we have a couple, two, three articles up that I think, and I choose these for the most part myself, that I think really offer some insights, things you won't read anywhere else.
And this is someone that I usually post his columns, Aleister Crook.
Essentially You Have To Disarm 00:06:57
He's a retired British diplomat who I think now is in Beirut.
He wrote a great piece that we put up called Break a Leg, That Old Mafia Warning.
Trump has threatened Iran over an ultimatum that likely cannot be met.
And the point of this, Dr. Paul, and he starts, he cites our friend Doug McGregor at the beginning that it reminds Doug of 2014 when Austria-Hungary gave Serbia an ultimatum, 10 points you must agree on.
They agreed on the 9th, but they couldn't agree on the 10th.
So Austria-Hungary declared war, which became World War I.
And that's what he's saying is being set up.
Now, go to the next one.
I did not know about this or had not, it had not been on my radar.
And I'm grateful to Alistair for pointing this out.
On 4 February, shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed a national security presidential memorandum, NSPM, that is to say, a legally binding directive requiring government agencies to carry out the specified actions precisely.
Now, listen to this.
The demands are that Iran should be denied a nuclear weapon, denied intercontinental missiles, and denied as well other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities.
All of these demands go beyond the non-proliferation treaty and beyond the existing JCPOA, quote, the Iran deal.
So essentially, what he's saying is it's not enough to not have nuclear weapons.
You can't have missiles.
You can't have other weapons.
Essentially, you have to disarm.
And if you go to the next one, this is what Alistair writes.
These present demands, which are beyond anything before regarding Iran, also run counter to the 25 March, 2025 assessment, annual U.S. intelligence threat assessment, and Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, an assessment that has been effectively disregarded.
We're not building it.
The CIA says you're not building it.
And the Trump administration, Netanyahu screaming in his ears, says, it doesn't matter.
You have to disarm, completely disarm.
Who would do that?
What country would do that?
You know, I mean, that's.
Yeah, it can get pretty discouraging.
Hoping people would eyes would be open.
But yet that's still our job.
Have to try because uh, you know the the ability for the other side to control a scenario and explain this to the average person.
And we have to realize the average person probably doesn't have an intense interest.
They're trying to figure out how they're going to pay their bills because they they're they're, they don't realize it, but but they should because it's related to their cost of uh, of living and their food prices going up.
All of this stuff is and uh, But it's whatever they can get away with, they do it.
And I can hear the neocons' voices in Trump's ear because what this looks like, and Aleister Crook writes about it, it looks like a twofer.
There's really a lot of pressure to finish off the Iranian regime.
They've already finished off Syria and Lebanon, finish off the Syrian, the Iranian regime, so that these Israelis can pursue their implementation of the Greater Israel Plan, which is what they want.
And Trump's in for it.
He even said we got to kick the people out of Gaza.
So on one hand, they're saying, look, if we take out Iran, Israel can do this, its Greater Israel project.
But also after that, we're going to pivot to China.
Get this thing off the list.
Check it off the list and we'll pivot to China.
And Crupp brings up an interesting point.
If you can go to that next one, which on the other hand, if you go to that for a second, if they all kinds of goes together, and it reminded me, which on the other hand will enable Trump to pursue a long overdue grand pivot to China.
And China is energy vulnerable.
Regime change in Tehran would be a calamity from the Chinese perspective.
So the neocons are telling Trump, look, take out Iran.
Israel will be happy.
China will be wrong-footed.
It will be a, go to the next one and skip it.
Go to the last one, second to last one, cakewalk.
It will be a cakewalk.
Remember this, Dr. Paul Ken Edelman, in February 13th, 2002.
Cakewalk.
That's what the neocons all said.
And you go to the next one.
This is what he said in his article in the Washington Post.
I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq will be a cakewalk.
Let me give a simple, responsible reasons.
One, it was a cakewalk last time.
Two, they become much weaker.
That's what they're saying about Iran, by the way.
Three, we've become much stronger.
And four, now we're playing for keeps.
They have the same playbook, Dr. Paul, that they're using with Iran, the neocons do.
You know, when you were using an analogy about 1914 and how things get motivated and it ends up very badly, I was thinking, you know, Jefferson said that the revolutions, and he was, you know, paraphrasing what he was saying.
He says, it looks like the nature of people means that you'll have to have a revolution about every 20 years to restate what you believe in.
And that was a bit of realism, I think, that he was expressing there.
But maybe on this international stuff to start the really big ones, they happen every hundred years.
Yeah, maybe.
Who knows?
2014.
Well, we'll see what happens.
I'm going to close out by thanking everyone for watching the show and asking you again to please, I'm doing it right now, hit that thumbs up, hit that like so that we can get a broader, broader reach.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I want to thank our viewers for tuning in today because there's lots of things going on and there's a dual war going on.
There's an economic war with tariffs involved.
There's also this hot war going on that we participate in and finance most of it all.
And it's up to the American people to wake up and tell their members of Congress, you know, what they ought not to be doing.
And it's huge.
It's difficult.
And it's because there's a lot of control of the media and it's hard to get the message out.
But the people are waking up.
I think that Elon Musk has done some help for identifying so many dumb, horrible things that our government does that maybe the people will wake up and enough is enough.
If the people don't wake up and they don't vote this stuff down and don't throw out the politicians voting for all this and fighting all these wars, the market will do it.
You know, empires end.
The Soviet system didn't want to end, but they were bankrupt because they had a stupid system.
Communism doesn't work.
Well, the system we have now really doesn't work well either.
And it's exaggerated interventionism that makes a difference where it's a pretend fair system, but no, it's a pretend system that hides the special interests who really run the country.
The deep state has to be recognized.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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