By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
President Trump’s tariffs sparking a sharp sell off before pivoting his stance with a 90-day reprieve and special exemptions for tech. What does this mean for Trump’s economic agenda? Yahoo Finance senior columnist Rick Newman joins us now with a closer look, Rick.
00:17 Rick Newman
Hey, Josh. Uh, so one of the things that markets have now told us is that uh, Donald Trump’s uh, protectionism and his tariff agenda, it means higher interest rates. This is not a surprise. Um, hi higher tariffs mean higher prices, higher costs. That’s inflationary. And when inflation goes up, and especially when investors think inflation will be higher in the future, uh, long-term interest rates go up. However, Donald Trump wants high tariffs. He also wants low interest rates, and he has not been shy about saying this. He has already called on the Fed to be cutting short-term rates to try to get rates down. His treasury treasury secretary says uh, the 10-year treasury rate is the main thing Trump is looking at. He cares more about that than the stocks. And yet Trump himself is the factor that is pushing those rates up. And I if you think about what we got from the inflation report last Friday, if if Trump took office, but he never launched a trade war, uh, we would have interest rate We would have long-term interest rates going down. We would probably have the 10-year uh, below 4%. We would have mortgage rates coming down to around 6%, and maybe lower. Trump wants all of those things, and he himself is the one who is standing in the way of those things happening. So um, you know, this leads to a scenario for the next uh, months and years, where we’re going we’re going to see, is Trump going to is he going to give up on tariffs? Because he wants to get rates lower? Is he finally going to accept that logic from the markets or is he going to try some unorthodox scheme to get rates down, even as his tariffs remain in place. And from what I’m hearing, that is sort of the new thing that investors are getting worried about.
03:12 Speaker A
So, I have an idea for you, Rick, about this unorthodox scheme. And by the way, it’s great to be on with you. Uh, here’s my my theory, and maybe just from your reporting, you can try to confirm or not, um, that if he wants to try to get inflation down, one way to do it is lower the price of oil. And how do you get oil prices down? You bring more oil onto the market. And I would argue that the reason he’s pushing so hard for peace in Ukraine, is you can bring Russian barrels back onto the market, and uh, arguing uh, perhaps for um, bringing Iranian oil back to market if they can curb their nuclear ambitions. Between the two, that’s five or six million barrels a day of total worldwide production, 90 million. Do you think there’s any thread of logic to that, Rick?
04:32 Rick Newman
Uh, I mean, it’s a rather circuitous way to get interest rates down, isn’t it, to focus on oil prices? I mean, another uh, so no, I don’t think there’s any logic to it. I mean, another thing that is I mean, we know what’s happening with the OPEC nations, um, putting more, trying basically trying to get market share from the from the uh, American uh, drillers. But another thing that is going to happen with falling oil prices is that American suppliers, which who have a break even of $65 or $60 per barrel, which is close to where we are now, they’re going to be producing less. Um, and Adam, you know, it gets to another way you could think about this is, if you really wanted to get long-term interest rates down, just cause a recession. I mean, that would do it. And by the way, causing a recession also would help lower oil prices. So, it gets, you know, the cause and effect gets very tangled. Um, so, you know, there are some people who think Trump is a four-dimensional chess master, and other people think that he just has one idea and he chases it as far as he can. Um, I’m closer to he’s just going with gut instinct, and there’s no master plan. But I, I would be happy to be wrong about that.
06:31 Speaker A
Rick, thank you, buddy. Always great to see you.
06:35 Rick Newman
You guys.