Morning Brew Daily - Trump Doubles Down on Tariffs & Robinhood Cashes In On Crypto
Episode Date: February 14, 2025Episode 519: Neal and Toby discuss the major announcement from President Trump imposing reciprocal tariffs on many of America’s trading partners that could shake up global trade. Then, RFK Jr. is co...nfirmed as the new Head of Health and Human Services as he tries to upend and overhaul the food industry which he blames as the majority of America’s health problems. Next, Robinhood gains ground in the crypto trading game, setting up fierce competition among crypto heavyweights. Meanwhile, DoorDash is the Stock of the Week and Reddit is the Dog of the Week. Lastly, a roundup of the biggest headlines for the weekend! 00:00 - 6-sec kiss can extend your life? 3:15 - Reciprocal tariffs coming? 9:20 - RFK Jr. confirmed to lead Health and Human Services 14:00 - Robinhood boosted by crypto 18:00 - Stock of the Week: DoorDash 21:15 - Dog of the Week: Reddit 24:00 - Sprint Finish! Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Check out https://wise.com/business for more! Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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Good morning brew daily show.
I'm Neil Fryman.
And I'm Toby Howell.
Today, Trump goes full Hamurabi's code
pledging an eye for an eye
with reciprocal tariffs on the countries of the world.
Then RFK Jr. was confirmed
as the nation's top health official
why everyone from cereal makers to drug makers
are bracing for change.
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Happy Valentine's Day.
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Okay, lots of thoughts here, Neil. First, are there compounding returns if six seconds of kiss
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You would probably get a little hungry by the end.
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I think I might try it out later this evening with my girlfriend.
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Remember all those other tariffs the Trump administration has talked about small potatoes.
Yesterday, the president unveiled what he deemed the big one, a set of reciprocal duties
meant to even out trade deficits America has with other countries.
Federal agencies are taking it slow initially conducting studies on how to update tariffs before
implementing them in April, but nearly every country that conducts international trade will
likely be affected, especially the likes of India, Japan, and the EU.
It's time to be reciprocal.
You'll be hearing that word a lot, Trump said earlier this week.
If they charge us, we charge them.
This reciprocal approach extends the U.S.'s trade wars to far,
more countries outside of just China, but we'll have to wait and see if this strategy is to
try and extract concessions, as Trump has been known to do, or a legitimate attempt to raise
import barriers and non-tax revenue in the process. Either way, implementing a new tariff code
is a massive undertaking that will require reevaluating hundreds of countries' current policies
and less than two months. Neil, the big one is here. And the big spreadsheet is coming. I mean,
If you think you're good with Excel, the Trump administration probably wants to hire you because this is about to be the most gnarly spreadsheet ever.
Imagine going to a tailor and getting a custom suit for every single country.
That's exactly what is about to happen.
And it's not just tariffs because say, Toby, I'm trading with you and you have 10% tariffs and I have 2% tariffs.
So I say, okay, reciprocal, I will bump my tariffs up to 10%.
know. There was a huge Clayton-Kershaw-level curveball here, which is that it applies to more,
you know, trade barriers than just tariffs. They want to go after subsidies, regulations,
value-added taxes, exchange rates, and other factors, all that amount to trade barriers on
the United States. And that will go into their calculation that what is deemed reciprocal.
So, yeah, this is not going to happen within weeks or months. So they're hidden, they're hidden the
books in figuring out what a reciprocal.
relationship actually looks like.
Let's take a step back and think about what the current system is and why Trump wants to
remake it.
Remember, we are currently in a global trade environment.
Following World War II, a lot of the most powerful economies and countries in the world
signed this thing called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades GATT.
That ushered in this era of scratching each other's back.
The agreement was eventually turned into and absorbed by the World Trade Organization.
So for a long time, this word tariff has been kind of this ugly word because you wanted to supercharge global trade.
You wanted to open up a lot of these pathways.
But now the Trump administration thinks that higher tariffs is this pathway towards bringing manufacturing back to the United States
and also potentially boosting revenue that you're going to lose if he implements these tax cuts.
So there's been a lot of criticism of these plans, obviously.
But this is kind of what Trump has been pushing for.
he wants to, you know, even the playing field on the global level, which really does up and
what the system we've been operating under for, you know, since post-World War II.
Yeah.
And economists would push back on Trump's reciprocal pushes and say, look, the reason that
tariff rates differ is because different countries are really good at making different things.
And we trade with each other so that, you know, one plus one equals three.
and a good example of this is coffee.
Brazil is great at making coffee beans.
They are the largest exporter in the world.
The United States, not so good at making coffee beans.
Our climate is just not acclimated to that.
So Brazil has a tariff on green coffee beans of 9%
because they have a big domestic industry there.
They want to protect it.
So they are putting tariffs on coffee beans coming into their country.
The United States, we don't make any coffee beans.
So we have 0% tariffs.
and that is to have cheaper coffee because if we put tariffs on coffee, we import all of them
essentially. So it'll just raise prices for consumers. And then on the converse of that,
let's look at an industry like pickup trucks. The United States is really good at making
pickup trucks. If you haven't noticed, just go to your local mall and look at all the cars in
the parking lot. Japan makes good cars, but they aren't good at making pickup trucks.
So Japan has a 0% tariff on pickup trucks coming from the United States because they
want their consumers to have as cheap pickup trucks as possible. The U.S. has a tariff of 25% on pickup
trucks from Japan because we have a local big industry here that we want to protect. So that's
sort of how it's shaken out over the past few decades. This is the reason why we have differing
trade and tariff rates. And now it looks like that is going to be shaken up. And one of the other
final critiques here is that if you insist that we are going to match your tariff rate,
We're going to be reciprocal with whatever, whatever you're charging us.
We charge you.
Then you basically are handing over your entire trade strategy to other nations because they say,
oh, you're going to match us.
We're going to jack imports up to, or the tariff rate up to 20%.
Now, you have to jack it up to 20%.
So you're like almost taking your agency away when dictating how you want to deal with other
countries.
So, yeah, there is just widely varying tariff rates depending on which country you're even talking about.
I mean, India has tariffs of 60% on automobiles and flowers, 50% on apples,
corn and motorcycles.
These are domestic industries that they want to protect.
So let's go back to this spreadsheet.
It is going to be quite this undertaking because there's just so many different industries,
so many different countries that you have to sort through and, you know, come up with a cohesive plan.
And it could also be a negotiating tactic.
The EU has already said that they would lower tariffs on U.S. exports in order to head off this trade war.
10% tariffs on U.S. cars right now. They said they would lower that to 2.5% to get ahead of this,
and that may be what Trump is ultimately after anyway. The United States has a new top health
official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime environmental lawyer and former presidential
candidate, was confirmed by the Senate yesterday to become the Secretary of Health and Human
Services. His anti-establishment agenda to make America healthy again could shake up the $4 trillion
dollar healthcare industry and the food sector, areas that are now under his expansive purview.
All Democrats voted no on Kennedy while all Republicans voted yes, except for one, Senator
Mitch McConnell. McConnell, who survived polio when he was a child, said he couldn't endorse
Kennedy over his previous criticisms of vaccines. In my lifetime, McConnell said, I've watched
vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world.
I will not condone the relitigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans
who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.
So now that RFK is in charge, despite McConnell's no vote, of the nation's vast health
and food apparatus, including the FDA and the CDC, what is he going to do?
We don't know quite yet, but the business world is bracing for impact.
In the past, he's railed against big pharma for over-medicating Americans, big food, for
creating an obesity crisis and big ag for putting pesticides and seed oils in diets.
Yeah, I think there are a lot of phones ringing off the hook in Washington right now who are
trying to figure out what to do under this new kind of purview that RFK Jr. has.
Let's start with vaccine makers because, you know, that's been a very hot button topic
under Kennedy's ideas there have been, you know, pretty controversial.
Remember, he called the COVID-19 shot that Pfizer produced one of the deadliest vaccines ever made.
He's walked back some of those comments since.
But a lot of these companies that still derive a lot of revenue from vaccines are nervous right now.
I mean, Merck has an HBV shot.
That's the company's second best selling a product.
Moderna's entire business is wrapped up in forming various vaccines.
And it's not just manufacturers that are potentially at risk here to CVA.
Yes, said in a recent annual report, that regulatory changes or consumer sentiment shift for immunizations
may hurt demand at some of its shores. So if you are a healthcare company that does rely on
vaccines as one of your mainstreams of revenue, then you are definitely a little nervous that
RFK Jr. is now in charge. And the cost of public health. I mean, just as we're talking
right now, there is a measles outbreak in West Texas. 24 people have been infected. Some have been
hospitalized and all of them were not, uh, were not vaccinated with MMR, the, uh, measles mumps and
rebella vaccine. And then another interesting angle here for the pharmaceutical company, some,
uh, a agenda item of RFK that has one support across the political spectrum, which we should
add, many of his ideas have gained byproducts and support, uh, you know, going after big
food saying that they put profits over the health of Americans. Bernie Sanders was like,
dude, I 100% agree with you. One of them, interestingly, for the pharmaceutical industry,
is that he wants to ban TV advertising for pharmaceutical companies. Elon Musk is on board
with this. And this would shake up TV and pharma. The pharma industry, you know, anyone who's
watched TV recently knows that they spend a ton of money on advertising. They are on track to
spend over $5 billion alone on national television as advertisements this year of five popular
nightly news shows on major networks last week.
Advertisements from the maker of prescription and over-the-counter drugs accounted for
half of ad spending.
So this is going to run up against a lot of opposition from industry, but it's just another,
you know, big idea that RFK has.
And then finally, one other idea that we should speak about is that RFK is not a fan
of weight-loss drugs. You know, Wagovi, Ozenpik, the GLP1 class of drugs that has absolutely
taken the world by storm. He said when I'm working the next administration, I will address
our sick food system. Instead, he wants to address, you know, the root cause rather than something
papering over it. And that could set up a fight with one of Trump's other top advisors. Elon Musk.
Elon Musk has been extremely supportive of these weight loss drugs. He went as far as to say,
nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan, and quality of life for Americans,
and then making GLP1 drugs super low cost to the public.
So that is a potential point of friction that we could see develop between two of Trump's top lieutenants.
Robin Hood, the trading platform best known for the meme stock boom is growing up.
It reported earnings earlier this week, and it was all highlights.
The company posted its first ever annual profit and revenue more than doubled.
It's been quite the turnaround.
After it went public, Robin Hood withered away losing 80% of its IPO market cap, but it staged a huge comeback sense with its shares more than quadrupling over the past year.
How did it write the ship?
Firstly, by attracting more serious investors away from competitors like Fidelity and Charles Schwab.
CEO Vlad Tenev said his company finished the fourth quarter with $1.3 billion in net transfers more than any other brokerage.
It also rode a crypto trading tsunami. Its crypto-based revenue jumped in insane 700% year-over-year
to reach $358 million. Neil's shares finished up another 14% yesterday. Robin Hood and its merry
band of crypto D-Gens is cooking. Robin Hood has certainly benefited from the hype around
crypto when people are trading crypto and people are trading stocks when there's volatility.
Robin Hood and its peers will do well.
And it hasn't just been Robin Hood. Coinbase reported a 100, which is the largest crypto trading
platform, reported a 130% rise in revenue just yesterday. Fidelity, Schwab are all raking it in.
So this, when Bitcoin goes over $100,000, these companies are going to benefit.
But you could say that Robin Hood has made certain tactful changes that puts it in a really good
position to benefit now to the point where its market cap is over $50 billion.
dollars. It's been releasing a number of financial products, crypto and other to make its
platform more sticky, get more people coming over from other platforms, get more money on Robin Hood
itself, rolled out a subscription offering called Gold, which it said has 2.6 million people
right now signed up, paying every single month for advanced features. It also rolled out a credit
card that has a very long wait list. So it's been peddled to the
metal for Robin Hood, and they're not even close to duck. Right. There's kind of two angles you can look at
here. One, it rode this animal spirits wave really well. Customers traded $14 billion in crypto in the
third quarter on its platform. Sounds like a lot. You go to the fourth quarter, that number jumps to
$71 billion. So just a massive uptick in crypto trading. But you're right. A lot of the reason why
analysts are a little bit more bullish on it is that Robin Hood is maturing as a company. It has these
very sober offerings. Like, it offers retirement accounts now. It has that credit card that it launched.
And also those funded accounts that are subscribing to its gold service, that is a very stable
form of revenue that doesn't, you know, wildly fluctuate alongside the crypto market. So that's why
analysts were like, all of a sudden, Robin Hood is kind of looking like a very well-positioned
company. It does have a long way to go to reach the big boys that have trillions of dollars in
assets on their platform. But right now, Robin Hood is certainly, you know, aging gracefully into
into its teenage years.
And we'll see whether in those teenage years,
it rolls into events contracts,
which is those prediction markets
that have become so big recently
with Polly Market and Kalshi.
Robin Hood did roll them out
ahead of the presidential election.
They tried to do it for the Super Bowl,
but the regulator stepped in and said,
no, please take that off.
So they did.
But, you know, a name like Robin Hood
getting into events contracts,
which is those things where you can just bet
on an event to happen
outside of sports.
It's like sports gambling.
but for just like things happening.
And the world will see if they are able to take these prediction markets mainstream.
It sounds like the event contracts are pricing in a 100% chance of us going to break right now.
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Welcome to Stock of the Week, Dog of the Week,
the segment where Toby and I pick one stock, that won best in show,
and another that needs to work harder for its treat.
I won the pre-show harmonizing contest, Toby, you were just a little flat on that high G.
So I get to go first, and my stock of the week is DoorDash, and not just because it came up clutch during my Super Bowl party.
The stock is up 5% this week after the delivery giant reported its first full year of profitability ever.
Revenue grew 25% during DoorDash's fourth quarter, while it posted net income of $141 million, compared to a loss of $150 million a year ago.
There was a time that DoorDash being profitable seemed as remote as Toby shooting under par,
It racked up hundreds of millions of losses, spending gobs on marketing, discounts, operations,
and there were plenty of haters saying the economics of food delivery,
a savagely competitive sector, would never work out.
But Doordash has managed to build a healthy business and become the dominant player
in the U.S. restaurant delivery space, commanding two-thirds of the market in distancing itself
from Uber Eats and Grubhub.
Oh, and the Super Bowl was pretty good for it, too.
DoorDash said its delivery drivers earned more than $50 million during the game this year,
up from 43 million last year from all you chicken wing ordering freaks.
People like having personal chauffeurs for their burritos.
Total orders are now up 735% over the past five years.
It's not just that Dordas is executing, which it has been very well for a long time now.
It's also that there's just a lot of demand for food delivery in general.
Just look at the results from Uber's delivery segment last week.
It also beat expectations.
DoorDash is a much larger player.
It controls two-thirds of the U.S. meal delivery market.
That is triple the share that Uber Eats has.
So I am curious to see how it does going forward
because these two companies have been kind of avoiding each other
for most of their early lifetime.
DoorDash initially went very hard, focused on suburbs.
Uber Eats, meanwhile, went very hard and focused on urban areas.
So now the two are mixing a little bit more.
They're stepping into each other's territory.
So I do think we might see another sort of food delivery war
start to cook up, but DoorDash is cooking.
And I think with its first profitable year, it is a signal of the maturation of the gig economy,
which I mentioned.
Few thought that the economics would ultimately work out for these type of companies,
but Lyft also reported its first profitable year ever in 2024.
Airbnb and Uber also reported their first profitable years in 2023.
Next up is Instacart, which is reporting later in this month.
and it could report its first profitable year ever.
So these companies that rely on independent contractors
that have been embroiled in labor negotiations
and criticized for not paying drivers enough,
but also just not being profitable enterprises
are really turning a corner here.
When were these companies started?
15 years after they started.
In the ZERP area,
those 0% interest rates definitely helped start them.
So a lot of people are saying they have these enduring modes
because we're not going to see an era like that
to raise capital again.
I do miss the discounts.
The discounts were incredible.
The millennial subsidized lifestyle.
My dog of the week is Reddit.
On the surface, Reddit's earnings this week were pretty solid.
101 million daily active users in Q4 up 39% year over year,
and a solid beat on revenue expectations should have made investors happy.
But instead, shares fell more than 15% on Wednesday.
The culprit, according to CEO Steve Huffman, Google tweaked its algorithm,
which led to fewer Reddit posts hitting that SEO sweet spot to get a boost in search results.
That means when you search for something like Severance Dead Seal explained,
Reddit posts might come up a little lower in Google's pecking order.
Hoffman tried to assuage investors fear during the earnings call
explaining that Google's algorithm changes take place two times a year
and that this one is not the first and not the last.
Still, an annoying development for a company whose shares had been up 23% so far in 2020.
The Reddit Google relationship is pretty interesting.
You could call them frenemies.
You can call it symbiotic.
But Reddit relies on Google for so much of its traffic.
55% of all of its users are what they call logged out users,
which are essentially people who come in from a Google search,
and they aren't logged in to the platform.
Those are most of the people that travel, that scroll through Reddit,
every single day. At the same time, Google needs Reddit as well. It's paying it $60 million for it to
help train its AI large language models. So you have this very interesting relationship between
Google and Reddit at the same time. They are also competing against each other. Reddit is also
has released this AI search tool that, you know, ostensibly would be what Google is for.
So it looks like Google's little algorithm, Reddit relies so much on Google, that
Google's tiny algorithm tweaks, which it does a couple times each year, you know,
through a hammer and a turnings and send its stock tumbling.
Yeah, Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, said that this one was particularly interesting because
they saw this immediate swing downwards, but then right after they saw recovery towards
the end of the quarter. So it is sometimes you live and die by these algorithmic changes,
but they are pretty adept at navigating them at this point. And it is definitely a symbiotic
relationship because most people just treat Google as almost like a rapper to get to
Reddit search results.
This is the only place I'm finding real verifiable results, especially in the age of AI.
So very interesting to see the two kind of dance around each other.
They both need each other, but also one changes affects the other pretty more intensely
than you'd expect.
Now let's sprint to the finish with some more headlines you may have missed.
I hope you were productive from January 19th until now because TikTok,
is back and available to download
in both the Apple and Google App Stores
as of yesterday. Remember, after
a law was passed by Congress and upheld by the
Supreme Court, the tech giants took
the app down back in January
so as not to run afoul of the legislation
and rack up huge fines in the process.
But yesterday, just about
a month after it was banned, U.S. Attorney
General Pam Bondi sent
a letter to Apple and Google, Pinky
promising that they won't be punished for
hosting the app. Taking the
Trump administration at their word, the two
decided to bring the app back, and now we can all swipe away again, as Trump tries to work
out a deal by early April to address the national security concerns around the app's Chinese
ownership.
I wonder what this letter said, because previously the DOJ said they wouldn't prosecute
TikTok, Apple or Google for allowing TikTok on their stores.
But they said, yeah, I don't think it's worth it because you have this law passed by Congress
which said, don't do that, or we will find you a bazillion dollars.
thousand dollars per user. And then you have the Trump administration that says, don't listen to them.
So I don't know what this letter said, but apparently it was convincing TikTok is back on these
app stores, which is huge for its continued relevance and growth in the United States.
Donald Trump Jr. wants to see just how fast roided up athletes can run and is putting his money
up to find out. Yesterday, the president's son announced a significant investment in the
enhanced games through his venture capital firm 1789 capital.
The Enhanced Games, best described as the Steroid Olympics, are a multi-sport event that will allow athletes to compete while using performance-enhancing drugs.
Trump Jr. views the Enhanced Games not as a sideshow project, but a disruptive force in sports,
challenging established norms, and offering up what he calls real competition, real freedom, and real records being smashed.
This is about excellence, innovation, and American dominance on the world stage, something the MAGA movement is all about.
I just have to say there's only one athlete that has signed up so far for the enhanced games.
And that's an Australian former Olympic team member, James Magnuson.
There's no date.
There's no location.
They seem to have enough capital.
This is tens of millions of dollars.
And another investor is Peter Thiel, which shows you sort of the political, who is a longtime Trump supporter,
and shows you the political persuasion of the enhanced games.
I'm just curious whether this thing is going to happen.
at all. I think the logic, too, is that if you can experiment and try to make these athletes superhuman,
potentially you could pass down some of those findings to overall public health. Bally G.
Servasanaan is another big investor. He said that technology will make athletes superhuman.
That will make everyone superhuman. That's why I was the first investor in Enhanced Game to improve
human health for all of us. So that's potentially another thread that you can trace back through
these investments that they do want to pass on these findings to, you know, the broader public health
sector. And the International Olympic Committee, the Biden administration, some other organizations
have come out and said, this is not a good idea. Not a good idea. Okay, if you get frustrated with
your Gen Z employees, you can commiserate with Giancarlo Romano. The alleged Mafia Don of the Sicilian
Crime Syndicate Casinosstra was heard on wiretaps complaining about the sorry state of new recruits.
He grumbled that these days the caliber of the youngans was quote miserable and reminisced about
Vito Corleone and the power he wielded in the Godfather, which was based on the Casinosstra.
Romano was heard saying, if you watch the godfather, the connections he had, he was very
influential because of the power that he built at a political level.
But us, what can we do?
Toby, these kids and their obsession with work-life balance.
This organization is not in the great spot right now, but I think I know how to fix the mafia.
Step one, call everyone back to in-person work.
None of this remote work stuff.
Step two, layoffs of the bottom 5% of employees.
Yeah, that's right.
Institute performance-based layoffs.
Step 3, mafia AI, improve efficiency with internal AI tools.
Step 4, movie night.
Everyone watches Godfather every single Friday.
Step 5, profit, I guess.
I think that's how you reform the mafia from top to bottom.
Okay, let's wrap it up there.
Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Friday.
Quick programming note.
Since Monday is President's Day, we will be off the daily news grind.
We taped a special holiday episode, and it's a fun one.
So be sure to tune in.
That is Monday morning.
For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at
MorningBrew.com.
And if you're enjoying the show, share it with a friend, family member, or coworker.
Toby, who should everyone listening share it with today?
Forgot to get a Valentine's Day card.
I got you, Kings and Queens.
Simply send your boo this episode and write, roses are red, violets are blue.
This episode of Morning Brew Daily is best.
listen to with you.
Aw.
Let's roll the credits.
Emily Billing is our executive producer.
Raymond Lute is our producer.
Olivia Graham is our associate producer.
Lonnie Fiscus is our technical director.
Garrett Peck is on audio.
Hair and makeup is down at the Eagles parade today.
Keep it classy.
Devin Emery is our chief content officer
and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
Great show today, Neil.
I wish you all well.
