By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
What is your expectation for a tariff rate that we can anticipate coming out of this meeting, if any?
00:08 Philip Levy
I mean, I don’t anticipate anything to change out of this meeting right away. Um, I imagine this to be a meeting where they start to describe where they might want to go eventually. Um, I think both sides are indicating they’re pretty far away from changing anything. And I would imagine that the PRC would want pretty substantial change to this rate if if they were going to lower their rates at all. Um, I would also say that, you know, both sides seem to be wanting to have the other one make the first move. Um, largely, I think it’s really good that they’re talking. Um, so we can start to move away from these incredibly high tariffs that are going to be very destructive to both economies.
01:17 Speaker A
How optimistic are you that we actually are going to get that lowered rate, and what is that timeline potentially gonna look like?
01:27 Philip Levy
I don’t know how optimistic you should be here. I mean, look, we’re already at a rate where you have tariffs that are way higher than you could ever imagine for a reasonable economic policy. Um, so we didn’t get to the place where we are following sort of the logical progression of activity. Um, I would also note, you know, your indication of sort of how we got here, which is actually very, very helpful, indicates that, you know, we got here through a sort of back and forth of lobbying of lobbying of tariffs. So, you know, it’s going to be hard. Trade wars are hard to unwind. They’re pretty easy to start, but they’re hard to back off from. Nobody wants to make any unilateral concessions, so you have to really negotiate for a long time. So, you know, I think we’re gonna have high tariffs for a while. If they really want to remove these, I mean, you know, the Trump administration could take these off tomorrow if they wanted to. Um, they haven’t seemed to want to. And I don’t think that we’re going to have tariffs that are going to be substantial on the PRC without them having substantial tariffs on us.
03:05 Speaker A
And, Philip, my guest host has a question for you.
03:10 Speaker B
Yeah, one of the questions I had is, where do you see us headed on rare earths and critical minerals, right? That seems to be a subset of the whole negotiation, and it feels to me a very important one.
03:24 Philip Levy
I couldn’t agree more. This is something that I think is sort of underappreciated. Look, I mean, there’s a reason that the last administration, uh, passed the IRA and invested an enormous amount in these technologies, because the Chinese have a stranglehold on the processing and mining of these rare earth minerals. That’s not just rare earths, which despite their name are actually not that rare. It’s also things like graphite, gallium, germanium, antimony, things that go in everything from semiconductors to brake pads, to bullets, right? These are really important components. They have the ability to really clamp off the supply of these. Producers have some stockpiles, but some of these things you can’t even stockpile that well. So, you know, I, I would imagine that hopefully there’ll be some sort of again, um, backing off. But we do also need to realize that this is a capacity the PRC has. They have the ability to put substantial pain on the US economy through their leverage in the space, just as we can put pain on their economy through leverage that we have. Um, so we do need to be sort of entering these conversations with that in mind.