Sticking it to the ChiComs through trade policy (04-09-2025--Hour2)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:30] We've been talking about what may be the economic model that is at the heart of what Trump is doing. It's called balanced trade. And it was first written about under that title, I don't know if it predates this, but 1996. I went over this in the last hour. And now we've got news that's breaking on, you know, China. That is, they've done retaliatory tariffs on us.

[00:00:58] And then Trump just hit him with another set. And he just said, there was a clip at the top of the hour news where he said, you know, this will continue until China comes to the table and does a deal. And they want to make a deal, but they just don't know how to, they don't know how to, to get here. And that may be part of it. Like they don't want to lose face in coming and working out a deal.

[00:01:22] Also remember, they're commies. Okay. They are communists. So you can't really trust them. Let me play a clip. Well, actually, let me get a call from Trent on first and then I'm going to play a clip of Mr. Wonderful. But Trent, welcome to the program. Hello, Trent. Hey, thank you so much. Love your show, man. Thanks. Awesome. I appreciate it. I want to give a shout out to PhD weight loss, man.

[00:01:45] I was June the 7th. I went into PhD weight loss, man. Those guys, those, those counselors are absolutely awesome. Those nutritionists, they're absolutely awesome. I was 263 pounds when I went in there. Five months later, I was down to 189 pounds, stuck with their plan, man. And it has been a game and life changer for me. That's awesome, dude. You started at 263. Yep. And you went down to 189. Is that your...

[00:02:12] I've lost 74 pounds and I'm still at that weight at this time right now. That's awesome, dude. Is that your goal weight? That's what you were shooting for? No, I was shooting for a little bit lower, but I was very happy. My wife started looking at me and goes, man, hey, you're getting really skinny. I said, yeah, I'm feeling pretty good about this weight and stuff. And, you know, I'm going to be looking good in my bathing suit when it comes this summer. So that's kind of how I was looking at it. Nice. That's awesome, Trent. It is. I love talking to people who have gone through the program like that because...

[00:02:41] And you hit your goal or you finished the program how long ago? I'm getting into the maintenance phase right now. Gotcha. Well, shoot me an email if you got any questions, whatever, about maintenance. I'm happy to help. But you know those nutritionists are there with you, too. They are tremendous. They are absolutely tremendous. But, you know, I spent 30 years actually putting on the weight. Yeah.

[00:03:07] And then it took a little time to get it off. It took me five months to get the weight off. And that's the way I kind of look over here dealing with Trump tariffs. Man, I mean, Bill Clinton, you know, no matter... I voted for him the second term. Oh. Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boo me. I tell you what, man. I really did. Even after all that would happen. But I'll tell you right now, my wallet was feeling pretty good during that time period. But, you know, he was one of the ones responsible for actually trying to be in the World Trade Organization

[00:03:35] and actually having a preferential trade status inside the World Trade Organization. Yeah, most favored nation status. Yeah. Exactly. And then NAFTA. That was Bill Clinton. Well, here's what they've done. We have sold our tail off to the rest of the world. Where are textile industries that used to be inside Concord in Kannapolis, North Carolina? Where is the steel industry? Where is our furniture business that used to be in Hickory and Winston-Salem?

[00:04:02] You know, where in the world are our drug manufacturers? Everything's being done over there. We've been at war with China economically for 35 years. And people are just waking up to it. I'm just glad that we've got somebody who's got guts enough to try something a little bit different. I'm kind of like you, Pete. I am a wait and see exactly what is going to happen. I'm not actually basing it on what's happening today. I think we have an overreaction on the stock market.

[00:04:30] I've got money invested in the stock. Am I taking a hit? Yeah. But I'm not looking to draw that money out today. I'm not looking to draw that money out tomorrow. I'm not looking to draw that money out next year. Yeah, but there are people who are looking to draw out next year. And we should keep that in mind, that there are people that are looking at the stock market and are concerned because their retirement accounts have taken a beating, and they may be approaching, if not entering right now, retirement. Absolutely. And I feel for those people.

[00:04:59] But once again, I didn't lose my weight in a day. I didn't lose my weight in a year, and I didn't put the weight on in a day or a year either. And I just think that we need to kind of actually be patient, see what happens, see what approaches. But something has to be done because those good textile jobs, those good industrial jobs, they have just gone to the wayside. I mean, they have just been pushed off to other countries where the labor is so much cheaper.

[00:05:25] Right. Well, and a lot of those jobs have been, I've talked about this before over the last week, a lot of those jobs have been lost to automation. These are high-tech jobs. You need fewer people to do them. And we produce, like right now, an American steelworker makes almost two tons of steel per worker per hour or something like that, whereas like 50 years ago, it was less than, it was like 0.08% of a ton.

[00:05:55] Like it, so the productivity has continuously gone up for our manufacturing sector. And I've said this number two repeatedly, half a million manufacturing jobs are unfilled right now in America. And the question I asked yesterday is, do people even want these jobs? Like we keep talking about how, oh, these will be good, you know, manufacturing jobs. But if people are refusing to work them, then what's the point of onshoring all of these jobs?

[00:06:25] Pete, I teach for a living. Yeah. And I have young men that just left my classroom that would love jobs like that. I just don't think there's a lot of recruiting going on manufacturing-wise to try to actually get these young men into those jobs. I'm not a big fan of Common Core, and I wasn't a big fan of No Child Left Behind. I wasn't a big fan of either one of those because I think we sold ourselves out to the rest of the world when we did that and tried to actually mainstream everybody to college.

[00:06:53] Have you seen the results that just came out about Mississippi? Have you seen their reading, their NAEP scores? I have not. They're number one in third grade math and reading. They're calling it the Mississippi Miracle. Like, they used to be the butt of the jokes, but they went back to phonics years ago, and they implemented a focus on reading and math at the lower grades, and they just did it the old-fashioned way,

[00:07:22] and now they had the highest scores or something. Yeah, I saw the headline on it and pulled the story. I just haven't gotten to it. But you as an educator, you may be interested to look that up because, like, to your point about Common Core, yeah, like, the old tools seem to work, and Mississippi just implemented them again, and it seems to have paid off for them. Absolutely. We get back to common sense. I think that we'll get back to a very prosperous America. Yeah. Now, I got you, Trent. I appreciate the call, buddy.

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[00:09:15] I knew him from Shark Tank, the NBC show. And I used to love watching Shark Tank, the early seasons. And I think everybody knows the concept, right? Inventors come in and they pitch their invention. And then you got five, you know, investors. And they negotiate deals with the inventor.

[00:09:40] And usually the inventor will give up a portion of the ownership of the company in order to get, you know, the sharks help with, you know, getting their product into the big box stores or getting production done or whatever. So it's really a fantastic show. And I've seen that there are a lot of products that are on the market today that came through this program. He's one of those sharks. Okay. So, and he's Canadian, if I recall correctly. Very wealthy.

[00:10:07] Does a lot of business in China, all over the globe and all of this stuff. So here he is on CNN. 104% tariffs in China are not enough. I'm advocating 400%. I do business in China. They don't play by the rules. They've been in the WTO for decades. They have never abided by any of the rules they agreed to when they came in for decades. They cheat. They steal. They steal IP. I can't litigate in their courts. They take product, technology. They steal it.

[00:10:37] They manufacture it and sell it back here. Never. Americans stand 400% tariffs. What would that look like? I want Xi on an airplane to Washington to level the playing field. This is not about tariffs anymore. Nobody has taken on China yet, not the Europeans, no administration for decades. As someone who actually does business there, I've had enough. I speak for millions of Americans who have IP that have been stolen by the Chinese.

[00:11:06] I have nothing against the Chinese people. They brought great literacy, art, and tech to the world. The government cheats and steals. And finally, an administration. You may not like Trump. You may not like his style or his rhetoric. Finally, an administration that puts up and says, enough. He'll tell you why. He'll tell you why.

[00:11:33] Xi can only stay the supreme leader if people are employed. If we wipe out any business there, because we are still 39% of all consumables on Earth and 25% of the world's GDP. America is the number one economy on Earth with all the cards. We will not have that forever. It's time to squeeze Chinese heads into the wall now. Well, hold on. I'm not talking about tariffs. I hear you, but hold on.

[00:11:58] If we're talking about people, the average consumer, not necessarily the head honchos of businesses all across the globe, can they withstand the pressure of that sort of tax on the goods? The majority lived. But yeah, but what's your timeline compared to you? You don't know the average American's timeline, what they can actually survive. There's people right now who can't survive. 400% tomorrow morning, cheese on an airplane to Washington to cut a deal. There you go.

[00:12:26] Kevin O'Leary advocating 400% tariffs in order to force the communist leader to get over here or his representative to get over here and negotiate a trade deal. By the way, congratulations to Richard from Matthews. He won the tickets. Good job, Richard. Joel Berry is the managing editor of the Babylon Bee.

[00:12:53] And in response to this clip from Kevin O'Leary, he posted on Twitter, formerly known as X, When I worked in international logistics, I had many customers who imported from China and even a few inventors of new products. The story was always the same. An American invents an exciting new product. They then manufacture it in China.

[00:13:20] And within a year, there are a hundred others in China stealing the design and flooding the market with cheap knockoffs. The inventor can't do anything and they lose it all. China has presided over the greatest theft and transfer of wealth from the United States in history. They need to be dealt with. Right. I have from the very beginning, ever since Trump rolled out this regime, what, April 2nd, whenever it was.

[00:13:50] I guess it was a week ago today. I guess so. So, and he had the big charts and all of that. I have been very clear that China is a separate thing than all of the other countries that we're talking about. Every country is going to be different, right? Whatever the, and my questions at the time were about, well, wait a minute. Why are we slapping tariffs on countries where we are running surpluses against them? Right.

[00:14:16] This doesn't seem like a uniform kind of a level setting kind of a deal. So, again, trying to decipher the rationale for all of the different pieces has been very difficult. Not just for me, but for everybody. And we get all of the mixed messaging not helping. But with China? We would never trade with the Soviet Union like we do with China. I understand the argument at the time.

[00:14:46] The free trade argument was, you know, the Soviet Union collapsed. And so we will encourage China to move away from that communist philosophy and move more towards the global community, if you will. It hasn't worked. It hasn't worked. And maybe, actually, the Communist Party would have fallen in China had we treated them the same way that we treated the Russians, the Soviets. Here's a great idea.

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[00:16:32] Number one, the Dow is now back up over 40,000. It has picked up, what is that, somewhere around 7%. It has made back almost all of the losses over the last two days. The reason, maybe, might have something to do with an announcement made on Donald Trump's Truth Social. Under his account. And it says, quote,

[00:17:01] Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the world's markets, I am hereby raising the tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125% effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the USA and other countries is no longer sustainable or acceptable.

[00:17:28] Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 countries have called representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to trade, trade barriers, tariffs, currency manipulation, and non-monetary tariffs, and that these countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States,

[00:17:53] I have authorized a 90-day pause and a substantially lowered reciprocal tariff during this period of 10%, also effective immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Which is like, that's what you get from your HR. Thank you for your attention to this matter. So he just cut. So all of those crazy rates that were all over the place and all that,

[00:18:23] they've all been, he's taken them all to just 10%, and paused for three months. Except China. Now, Eric Erickson, who was a talk show host out of Atlanta, he wrote the following, I got up this morning to start writing and show prepping. Much of what is below was written last night with the goal of getting up this morning and revising it.

[00:18:51] Which, by the way, when you do a show, you're always prepping. And I will prep stuff for this show. I will prep it all morning long. I wake up at 6 and I start prepping, but I also prep after the show for the following day. Right? So, I'm constantly putting stuff into the pipeline. And then, you know, you wake up in the morning, you look at the day's news,

[00:19:20] and if nothing is really going on, ah! Just kidding. There's always something going on. But you then, you know, you try to piece together the show from the prep you did the night before and from the morning. So, part of his process is he writes this stuff out in the previous night. So, this is what he says he wrote last night in preparation for his show today. Given overnight markets, he says,

[00:19:49] I am told by somebody in close Trump orbit that the president is considering a pause on the tariffs despite his statements last night. He came under extraordinary pressure from major donors late yesterday to find any excuse at all to claim that he could pause the tariffs. The speculation is pretty much what I had guessed. He will claim that he has so many offers to negotiate that tariffs need to be paused

[00:20:19] because he cannot negotiate so many deals before tariffs affect all of those begging for relief. Which is exactly what Trump just announced. Erickson said, the bottom line is I am told by very reliable, I am told very reliably that yesterday major business leaders who backed Trump's election made clear to him that bad things are coming if the tariffs are not paused.

[00:20:48] Keep in mind, this is not a guarantee. Parts of the close Trump orbit there is a growing belief that given his conversations yesterday he'll hit pause sometime this week. That's what Erickson had worked up based on his contacts inside Trump world last night for today's show. So a 90-day pause

[00:21:17] and a reduction to a baseline 10% that's where this is now gone. And this was all part of the plan I assume. That's look, I'm not going to argue with people about what was the actual intent and what wasn't or whatever. because when people have beliefs it is very difficult to move them off of those beliefs. People spend a lot of time defending positions and then if those positions flip

[00:21:47] then they'll they'll be faced with either the recognition that they were lied to and that they helped to promulgate the lie or they have to kind of double down and just say that's what the that's what the plan was the whole time. I don't need to know what the plan is. I'm just being a foot soldier basically. And so he always had this plan this was always the way it was going to go. I don't know if that's true I'm just to be clear see I'm not laying down a marker saying

[00:22:15] he lied about all of this I have no idea what happened. But if people in Trump world told Eric Erickson that a bunch of these business leaders that were big donors to Trump came in and they were like dude you're going to wreck us. You need to find an off ramp fast. And here's the thing he's keeping the ones on China and that's really like that's the biggest threat.

[00:22:45] That's the biggest problem that we have with the trade deficit. It is. We run surpluses to other countries. It's China that as you just heard in the clip from Kevin O'Leary it's China that has ignored all of these WTO regulations. They've stolen intellectual property from countries and people all over the planet. We're not the only ones. And so fighting them

[00:23:14] on their economic practices I think that's the proper target. So I don't know we'll see. By the way I mentioned at the beginning that there was a fellow by the name of Jim Rickards he was on a podcast I have some audio I'm going to start playing some of it in the next segment and then more in the final hour but Rickards is a proponent of these tariffs so he's a supporter

[00:23:44] of what Trump has been doing. Okay but he also says we are in a recession right now. that's what he says based on the analytics that he looks at he says because the definition of a recession despite the Biden team's attempt to redefine it you know a couple years ago two quarters of negative quote growth of shrinkage basically two quarters back to back right that's always been the definition of a recession but you don't know that until after the fact.

[00:24:15] So there are other analytics that he looks at and he says those analytics show that we are in a recession and we are at the part now where it's like it's now settled in. All right if you're listening to this show you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events and I know you do too and you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well because it's how you detect media bias which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website

[00:24:44] and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself

[00:25:13] check.ground.news slash Pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. All right. So this fella Jim Rickards a seasoned attorney I don't know what kind of seasoning but he is seasoned also an economist

[00:25:41] and a national security expert over his four decade career he has advised the CIA the Pentagon the U.S. Treasury he has played pivotal roles in financial negotiations during multiple national crises he is the author of Currency Wars The Road to Ruin and other New York Times bestsellers he was on the Triggernometry podcast the episode is the latest one I believe that's up there so you can watch it if you would like and

[00:26:10] he has asked about his current read on or his read on the current situation We probably are in a recession the thing is you know the official scorekeeper this is for the United States not the world a world recession is rare by the way usually you know one sector you know Europe or the United States or Asia could be in a recession others might be doing better trying to pull the world economy out of it but a global recession they do happen but they're quite rare but just with reference with regards to the United States

[00:26:39] there's this National Bureau of Economic Research it's a bunch of egghead economists up in Cambridge and they're the official unofficial scorekeepers so they tell you when you have a recession when you're out of it etc and that's widely accepted the problem is they usually tell you you've entered a recession about six months after it's over so you can't really rely on them so you have to look at a lot of other metrics predictive analytics and so forth if you want to either predict it or just kind of know it in real time so you're saying

[00:27:08] the US may already be in a recession what are the markers what are the markers well there are a lot of them but one is you know the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has a tracker it's called GDP Now it's actually pretty good some of these statistical methods certainly the ones on Wall Street aren't worth our time but the Atlanta Fed is a pretty good tracker it went from round numbers kind of positive 2.4% for the first quarter of 2025 to negative 2.7%

[00:27:37] in a matter of days and it looks like an Acapulco cliff dive it went straight down and they said well the reason is because of Trump's tariff proposals and you know he puts them on takes them off no one really knows but because of that there was a surge of imports people were trying to actually get stuff into the United States before the tariffs hit and of course imports increased the trade deficit which decreased the GDP and that was the explanation for that probably something to that but there's just a lot else going on we're not quite at the stage of mass layoffs

[00:28:07] but hiring hit a wall about six months ago a little bit longer where they just stopped basically people weren't hiring anymore they firing people is the last thing you do by the time you get to the layoff stage and see unemployment going up that's a sign that's a lagging indicator you're probably already in the recession because it's so hard to find people train them you know get them going it's the last thing you want to do so you'll you know cut out the laundry bill you know turn down the electricity negotiate the rate you'll do a lot else

[00:28:36] before you lay people off when you start doing that we're getting close to that point now all right another indicator he points to is the yield curve and he explains that well fortunately this is an easy one so so the yield curve is just you know a typical curve so the y-axis the vertical axis are interest rates and the x-axis the horizontal axis are maturities so the u.s treasury people say you know government securities well okay but there's a one month bill a three month bill

[00:29:06] a one year a two year note a five year note all the way out to a 30 year bond so that's the x-axis all right so i'm going to pause right there so you understand get the visual in your head on the left side you've got the you know vertical axis the y-axis top to bottom and that's the yields the interest rates and then on the bottom is the x-axis and it's broken up into basically time period how long it takes for the bonds to mature from you know months all the way

[00:29:35] out to 30 years and so what that yield curve normally looks like is it starts in the bottom left hand side of the of that axis of that graph starts at the bottom left and then kind of like gradually goes up like a hill it goes up and then flattens out at the top that's what a normal yield curve looks like so the y-axis or interest rates every one of those has a different interest rate they can be close

[00:30:04] or there could be a spread and all you do is you plot those interest rates so what's a normal yield curve a normal yield curve is upwardly sloping from left to right and that makes sense you know longer maturity if I'm going to lend to you overnight I might want one rate if I'm going to lend you for 10 years and say well a lot could happen in 10 years so I'm going to want a higher rate so an upwardly sloping yield curve is normal but periodically it's not highly it's not that unusual a little bit unusual you get a downward sloping yield curve where the longer maturities

[00:30:34] have lower interest rates what does that tell you well the treasury market that's the big money you know you're one of the ones authorized to deal directly with the Fed there are only about 20 banks with that status so you talk to the Fed every day a downward sloping yield curve this is where again the big the big money kind of sets this the market sets this tells you that a recession is coming and how do you draw that inference well let's say short term interest rates

[00:31:03] are 4% and longer term interest rates are 3% what actually the actual numbers now are closer to 5% and not 4% so but you say well gee I'll take a 4% coupon 4% yield maturity on a 10 year note because that's going to look really sweet a couple years from now when interest rates are 1.5% when the recession kicks in and interest rates collapse that high coupon is going to look very attractive number one number two bond math 101 is kind of counterintuitive

[00:31:33] but when interest rates go down prices go up and when interest rates go up prices go down so if you believe recession is coming and interest rates are coming down you'll lock in the higher coupon now and when interest rates do come down you'll have capital gains on that note so it's a really attractive trade but meanwhile back here at the short end of the curve 30 day bills or 3 month bills or 6 month bills or whatever that really is much more subject to Federal Reserve control it's about the only

[00:32:02] thing they control this idea that the Fed can control long term rates by manipulating short term rates because this is just the value of a strip of short term rates that's all nonsense and that's a theory you can do the math but that's all nonsense so the point being when you have a downward sloping yield curve that's a sign that the recession is coming people are bidding for those intermediate term securities pushing the rate down a little bit but it's going to look real good hold on Jim one second sorry is that a sign that recession is coming or is it a sign

[00:32:32] that people think a recession is coming well people but the people are the biggest institutions in the world this curve is set by sovereign wealth funds endowments pension funds insurance companies the players in that market it's not that they're infallible but they are it's a basically distillation of all the big money in the world kind of saying something to you and so you should you should kind of just the math is simple the yield curve is simple to look at but you have to know what it means right

[00:33:01] and where we are now now it's kind of flattening and that that means the recession is here alright that'll do it for this episode thank you so much for listening I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast so if you'd like please support them too and tell them you heard it here you can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepcalendorshow.com again thank you so much for listening

[00:33:30] and don't break anything while I'm gone I'm gone Thank you.