00:00 Speaker A
Bill Dudley, I am so glad that you and I get a chance to converse. I’m a big fan of yours. You may not be one of mine, but I am a fan of yours. And I would like to just try to figure this thing out, this tariff thing. What if, I’m going to play the devil’s advocate. What if there’s some sort of scenario where effectively, it’s a game of chicken and the other countries say, you know what, we’re not going to stick with our 10% tariffs as an example on your American cars that come over to Europe. We’re going to cut to two and a half, which is what you charge us. What if this is actually just a giant negotiation and we’ve gotten so fixated on the worst case scenario that it’s not as bad as we actually think?
01:23 Bill Dudley
It’s possible that it could go that way, but if you look at the run of news over the last three months, every month we’ve been thinking that the tariff increases are going to be bigger, more persistent. I mean, I think the fact that the Trump administration is, you know, taking on Canada is a sign that they’re really quite serious about tariffs. I mean, what did Canada to do to deserve this? We do not have a big immigration problem of people coming over the border from Canada. We don’t have a big drug problem of drugs coming over the border from Canada. Canada is integrated with the US economy, and then we’re potentially blowing up that integration. So, I think that this is not being done in a really careful, thoughtful way. Now, there are times where tariffs make sense, when you’re trying to protect national security or you’re trying to protect industries that are just getting on their feet. But broad-based tariffs against everybody regardless of how they behaved, that doesn’t seem like good policy to me.