By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Well investors are hearing a lot these days from Trump economic officials about trade, and Dodge, and the benefits of falling stock prices, but not as much about things that could stop that selling. Joining us now with more Yahoo finance is Ben Worshkol.
00:11 Speaker A
Ben, we we keep framing a lot or we hear a lot of policy wonks sort of frame it as we’re getting the vegetables and then eventually we’ll get the dessert, but man, that dessert is sort of a moving target, isn’t it?
00:27 Ben Worshkol
For sure. Yeah. So the question is increasingly, not only are we going to get the dessert, but when are we going to get the dessert, and is the dessert going to actually be that good when it when it gets here? Yeah. I mean, so the the overall message from the Trump team for for weeks and months now has been this mix. It’s you kind of take the good with the bad from a market perspective. You get the tariffs, but you also get deregulation. You get so the dodge cuts which may cause a little chaos, but you get tax cuts and part of it. And part of what we’ve seen in recent weeks is that taxes are not only being downplayed, but they’re often sort of not even mentioned as much anymore. And that’s partly a reflection of how little news there’s been on taxes. Congress moves much more slowly than the president can, especially on tariffs. Congress is out for the coming weeks, so we’re not even going to expect to get a whole lot more there. And then there’s been this sort of flurry of of tariff news from Trump over over every week on it. And then we have an April second deadline coming up for reciprocal tariffs, and that’s expected to kind of dominate the conversation for another two weeks without a lot expected on tariffs. Trump’s line today I wanted to bring you was that his line is that April 2nd is going to be liberation day for our country on tariffs. So, he’s definitely focused on this tariff side of it. The question is when he pivots to taxes and and and what that actually looks like for markets.
02:22 Speaker A
And as you know, Ben, I’ve been asking a lot of investors, what happens if that pivot doesn’t happen, right? What happens if there isn’t this big bill that includes an extension, and or maybe more than an extension of tax cuts? And investors don’t first of all, don’t even really seem to be considering the possibility that it wouldn’t happen. But they do say if it doesn’t happen, it will be bad, right? Sort of unequivocally.
03:02 Ben Worshkol
For sure. Yeah. There’s there’s analysts out there that have this as an 80% chance of a bill happening, which which 20% are not happening. That’s a one in five chance that we actually don’t have a bill at the end of the year just because this tax stuff is so complicated. There’s so many issues in there, and then the costs are so high that it’s unclear exactly how Washington is able to justify this with a $36 trillion current debt. Some of these numbers we’re talking about is an additional 10 trillion in in debt on the GDP. And so, what we have what we’re left with is lawmakers grinding through this really slow process trying to figure out a way to extend these and add things like no tax on tips, no tax on social security that Trump is really focused on. But it’s going to be a long slog, and it could be it could be kind of one of these things where we don’t know till December. And even that uncertainty makes markets unhappy for certain.
04:09 Speaker A
Yes, we have seen lots of evidence of that this year thus far. Ben, thank you.
04:16 Ben Worshkol
My pleasure.