The Duran Podcast - Tariff turbulence and reindustrialization

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Tariff turbulence and reindustrialization

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the Liberation Day tariff wars that are going on. The markets are crashing in Europe, China, Hong Kong, everywhere. The markets are crashing. Crypto, Bitcoin is crashing. Trump is holding firm. He obviously believes in this tariff strategy. And we do have some countries retaliating. Well, you can't call the European Union a country.

Let's call it a globalist institution. And they're retaliating. They're in panic mode, as they should be, because globalization has come to an end. And the European Union, as we said in the video we recorded last week, is the preeminent globalist organization. So obviously, they're in panic mode. And they're going to retaliate with a $28 billion sanction package. tariff package towards the United States. China has retaliated. We also have countries that want to negotiate. The Trump administration, about 50 countries, according to the Trump White House, have contacted them and they want to talk. We have India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Israel. Taiwan, they say, has reached out as well to the Trump administration.

So it is unfolding in a way that we talked about. Some countries are retaliating. Yes. Some countries want to talk. And you have a lot of the world, which is just sitting back and just kind of watching. And they haven't made any moves yet. The market's crashing. I don't think this is a surprise that the markets would crash in this way.

The question is medium to look. long term. How does everything unfold? Anyway, your thoughts about the terror force? Yes. It's one of the most extraordinary things about this story is that when Liberation Day came, it seems to have come to so many people as a surprise that people didn't really believe that it would happen. Even though Trump has been talking about this for decades. Now, we've done many shows. We've done many shows. Six months ago talking about tariffs and McKinley. Yeah.

Yeah. We've done many progress. No, I think that people need to understand one thing about Donald Trump, which is that when he gets, when he develops a belief about something, he absolutely means it. And I have absolutely no doubt that he's going to see this thing through. He's going to stick with it. He believes in this policy. He has a body of economic thoughts behind him as well. He understands that there's going to be turbulence.

He believes it's going to be short term. He's confident that he's going to see it through. And he believes that in three, four years time, the fruits of what he is doing, of what he has done are going to start to become visible to American, to his voting base in the United States and indeed to the people of the United States in general. He has, and this is one of Trump's strengths, actually.

He has this unshakable belief in America and what it can do, which the last politician who had that was Ronald Reagan, by the way. And Trump shares it. He absolutely believes that America, America business, American industry, will rise to the challenge, or rather the opportunity. of these tariffs, that they will start to produce these goods and they will start to re-industrialise and that things will turn out well in the end for the United States. And he also understands something else. And about this, by the way, I have no doubt that he is absolutely right, which is that the previous economic course that the United States was engaged in,

piling up debt, running massive deficits, engaging in chronic overspending, relying on foreign countries to supply the United States with more and more of the goods it needed so that it could focus on external diplomacy, hegemony and all that kind of thing, globalism, globalization and all of that sort of thing, was firstly unsustainable and destroying the American heartland. So he has, you know, a genuine set of core beliefs here. He has people in his administration who think as he does. And absolutely, this is for the long term, as far as he's concerned. I don't think you're going to see any major rowback of the tariffs. Some countries want to negotiate.

He might be prepared to do deals with some of them. Vietnam is in a terrible place because they basically took over from China as a supplier of, you know, cheap goods for the United States, easily produced goods for the United States, textiles and all kinds of other things, Nike shoes. I'm not being disrespectful to Vietnam. It's a rational economic choice. It is the way to get your foot up the ladder of industrialization. That is what Vietnam did.

Now it's been really badly hit. They're desperate to try and find some way to persuade the Americans, to lift these crippling tariffs on their goods. And because these are relatively cheap goods, the margins that Vietnamese producers must be making on them must be relatively low. It's not like very high-end goods that Vietnam can, well, adjust the prices on easily

in order to get back into the American market. So they're going to be trying very, very hard to get back into the American market. Some of the other countries will also, India may be, in some cases, maybe the United States will grant some degree of tariff reduction, perhaps for geopolitical reasons. But I don't think that is how Donald Trump sees this. I think in his own mind, making, granting, favors in order to pursue strategic alliances, mixing geopolitics with industrial regeneration and trade, is not, I think, where he wants to go at all. And I think many countries will find themselves

that they are negotiating with the Americans, but that the balance of the negotiations is very lopsided in the Americans' favor. And that, Ultimately, if they are going to do a deal, it will be a deal done very, very much on American economic terms. So that is the future that the world is facing. I think we're going to see tariffs right through Donald Trump's presidency. I think as far as the economic, the financial turmoil in the markets is concerned, he is absolutely willing to accept that.

I think he feels that this is something that ultimately doesn't concern him. He knows that, just put it simply, crudely, Wall Street, which he had supported as president in his first term, overwhelmingly ended up backing the Democrats. With Trump,

these factors are never things that he forgets. So he doesn't care ultimately about what goes on in Wall Street or what the shareholding middle classes of America think about this. Because they're not his core constituency. He's called constituency, farmers, industrial workers, people who work in building trade, people like that. And he believes, I mean, he may be wrong in his beliefs, but I'm talking now about what he believes. He believes that these economic policies that he is going to, he's implementing now, ultimately are going to work for them and for America. Bear in mind, on Liberation Day, who was he addressing? He was addressing American auto workers.

They were there in the Rose Garden as he was, you know, going through his post. So this isn't going to change and this is the policy that is going to be followed by him. And I predict it is going to be the policy that the Republican Party ultimately is also going to adopt. The Republican Party has changed significantly during the Trump era. It is now increasingly the party again of these constituencies that now form Donald Trump's coalition. And the Republicans historically in the United States were always any way the party of protection. So I think that this is forever. I think even if the Democrats are elected in 2028 or beyond that, they're not going to reverse this.

And, well, what the long-term effects of these policies in the United States are going to be? Well, that is a matter which I think we should discuss with economists and people who know about these things. But to repeat again, the previous trajectory that the United States was on economically was unsustainable and was damaging the economic. heartland of the United States and in the long term, the people of the United States as well. There has to be a change. And Donald Trump has sensed that, and that's why he's doing what he's doing. True. True. Something had to be done. The question is, was this the right decision? But something had to be done without a doubt. And this was the mandate that was given to Trump. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a...

It's why those auto workers voted for him. It's why those people right across the United States who rallied to him, rallied to him in the way that they did. By the way, can I just say something? It's an absolute misunderstanding of people. I speak as somebody who's been on the fringes of politics and has had many interactions with so-called working class people, people from lower-end demographics. The way people, you know, in the more upper class demographics, think about these people is completely wrong. Absolutely, auto workers think and worry about these things. They are fully aware of what kind of decisions are being made in Washington about economic policy.

They take these sorts of things completely seriously. One of the reasons they voted for Donald Trump is because he went out to them, he talked to them, he listened to them, he spoke to them, he spoke to them in ways that they related to, and that's why they supported him. And as far as he's concerned, he's fulfilling his side of the bargain to them. And despite the economic turmoil that we're going to see over the next few months, maybe years, I predict that they will stick with. team. Yeah. The fear of recession. I imagine that the U.S., they've been running away from a recession. They've been engineering different tricks to avoid a recession. You can make the argument that under Biden, there was a recession, but obviously we got data and numbers that tried to argue that there was not a recession, or at least for a couple of months, maybe there was a recession, but Biden figured out a way

playing around with the numbers so that the recession was very short. You've made the point that a recession, while it's difficult, is a way for an economy to readjust, to rebalance. And in the life of a country and in the life of an economy, you have your ups, you have your downs, and recession is just part of that lifespan and you have to just kind of work through it and readjust and rebalance. Are you still under that belief with the tariffs that this is just going to have to be something that the United States is going to have to readjust and rebalance and work through?

Absolutely. Can I just say, I mean, one of the problems with the United States, I've spoken about this many times is that at least since the 1980s, there has been a absolute political. determination to basically abolish the business cycle. I mean, the idea that you can absolutely abolish the business cycle, that you can have continuous growth, that you can massage the economy constantly using monetary policy and fiscal policy, but mostly monetary policy, so that whenever signs of recession appear, you immediately cut interest rates and flood the economy with liquidity in order to keep

the economy growing. This has been going on for year after year. So the result is that imbalances in the economy have steadily grown, all kinds of distortions have happened, de-industrialization has accelerated. And this whole process has been masked because we've had this flood of money into the system, which appears to keep the GDP figures high and which, of course, benefits. some people more than others. And of course, all it's done is that it has built up massive problems in the economy, which have grown steadily, steadily worse. Sooner or later, this would have run

its course, probably quite sooner, actually. I suspect we are probably close to that. We would have been close to that inflection point anyway. When things started, would have started to come apart. And then we wouldn't have had just a recession. We'd have had something far worse than that. And yes, recessions are very unpleasant things. Businesses fail. People lose their jobs. The job of government at that time, at that point, which is, by the way, Keynes's argument. Keynes was never somebody who advocated abolishing the business cycle or anything like that, was that when recession hits, the role of government is to make sure that people are protected to the extent that they are so that the damage done to individuals who might not be themselves

guilty of some of the accumulated errors that have caused the recession are mitigated and there is enough demand to help move the economy back upwards. I'm not going to get into a discussion of Keynes and of economics. Suffice to say that, I think we will completely misunderstand him. But anyway, that's my own personal view. Now, I suspect, going to have a recession in the United States over the next few years, maybe a year or so. It could be quite steep.

But the reason it will be so steep is because, the economy is unbalanced and because recessions that should have been allowed to work their way through have been artificially prevented or masked for so long. So yes, we will get a recession. And the job of the US government at that point will be to do all the things that I just said help people to get through that recessions as governments can do. But let's have no more about this abolishing the business, you know, Polis attempts to abolish the business cycle, to keep growth constantly going, to have, you know, the Greenspan puts and the Bernanke puts and all of these things, which ultimately have only

assisted Wall Street, the finances there, the various other parts of the economy that are based surround her. Talk a bit about China and the European Union. My sense of things would be, and I'm talking very big picture, would be that China makes it through whatever trade tariff war is going to play out with the United States. I think China will make it through, as I believe the U.S. will make it through. The EU, I'm not so sure. I think the EU eventually will buckle and will submit to whatever the U.S. dictates to it. And you're probably looking at, if you believe the European Union is a vassal of the United States now, I imagine that give it a few months, maybe a few years, the EU will be completely subjugated in a vassal to the United States. That would

be my big picture view of things, but I don't know. How do you see things? China will absolutely comes through. I mean, quite possibly they will experience a recession as well. I don't think it's going to have any effect on the political system because Xi Jinping and his people not only have tight control over China, but they'll be able to tell people in China, look, this isn't something that is our fault. It's been imposed on us because the Americans have done this to us. And people in China will absolutely accept that. But China will come. through. It is on a major upward swing, which is unrelated to the fact that it has been exporting to the United States. The upswing in China is a much, much bigger story than just

American China trade. So China will come through. They will develop policies to cope with these problems, they have already been preparing for them for some time. I mean, this is a fundamental point I said at the beginning that I'm astonished that people were taken so completely by surprise by these Trump tariffs, given the fact that he always said he would do them, and he clearly believes in them. The Chinese have never been under any of those illusions. They are going to prepare for them. They've already worked with, they've already worked with, they They've already set up an alternative trade system, or at least an embryo alternative trade system, which is bricks. They're going to move forward with that.

They're preparing the alternative payment mechanisms. Apparently there's going to be a very important summit in Rio coming up very close, very soon. We're going to move further and faster with all of those things. The Chinese have a plan. They haven't structured and functional government. They have a well-organized technocracy, if I could put it like that. A skilled and very disciplined industrial workforce. They will find their way through.

The Europeans are all over the place. The Europeans absolutely told themselves this isn't going to happen. They've made no preparations for this at all. I know of no plan that was prepared in advance of this tariff announcement by anyone in the European Commission, by any European government to prepare for this. There'd be no consultations amongst European leaders. They're busy with Ukraine. Exactly. How many meetings have they had about Ukraine and about sending peacekeepers to Ukraine?

I mean, I've lost count of how many. but they've had no meetings, no discussions about what to do. They're lurching towards retaliatory tariffs of some kind against the United States. What is that going to achieve at the end of the day? And as a creature of globalization, myself am of the view that sooner or later, probably sooner rather than later, we're going to see the, the cracks within this entire project, EU project, start to grow. We've discussed in many, many programs how the EU has always managed up to now to kick the can down the road to keep the project going.

But it's able to do that in a world of globalization. I personally don't think they can do that in the world that we're going to see now. And I think that five, ten years, who knows how long, we're going to finally see this whole thing unravel. Because it is so completely contrary to the general economic landscape which we are going to see. It is so completely incompatible with it that I cannot myself see how I can survive. Yeah, just a final thought, and we'll wrap up the video. The European Union, they're still talking about an 800 billion defense fund. They've got this whole tariff thing unfolding.

They're not prepared for any of it. And they're talking about an 800 billion defense fund. They're talking about creating another fund, which would allow Ukraine to purchase weapons on a loan. They're completely lost. They're completely lost. They're totally and entirely lost about this. As I said, they're overwhelmingly focused on Ukraine and their own set of rearmament policies and on the Russians.

And they're not, they've completely lost sight that the whole economic architecture, which has upheld them is collapsing all around them. It is most extraordinary, actually. Yeah, the world is passing them by. All right, we will end it there. The durand. We are on Rumble Odyssey, Binchotel, Inche, Telegraph, and RockFit, and X.

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