This week on Capitol Gains, anchor Madison Mills, Washington Correspondent Ben Werschkul, and Senior Columnist Rick Newman break down the latest on Trump’s tariff policies. Mills takes a closer look at the current market response and how investors are reacting in the days leading up to the President’s announcement of new reciprocal tariffs on April 2.
To learn more, listen to the full episode of Capitol Gains here.
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You seem to think investors are still uh underestimating the the extent of these tariffs.
Well, it's interesting when we have policy experts on our live programming and I asked them is the market prepared for April second? They consistently and vehemently say no, they are not. We are not priced in on the risks to come on April second. And then when I talked to investors on the back of that same conversation, they come out and say, "Well, I think it's going to be fine. I think we're going to take him seriously, not literally." And therefore, it's all going to be good. He just wants to make a deal. I had one source this morning pointing to the fact that uh the president was asked about the China tariffs and said he may be willing to negotiate if he can get a TikTok deal. That was a signal to them that he is not serious on the totality of tariffs he has teased out uh because he is using them as a deal-making tactic, which is something that we have seen him interested in previously as you guys have both reported on. I know Ben that one of the questions I'd asked you this week is the degree to which any idea that these tariffs are not going to be incredibly serious is a leak to the press coming from the economics and markets focused side of the White House, rather than the executive chair. Is that something that your reporting has continued to back up this week?
For sure. Yeah, this has been a dynamic of covering Trump all the way back to Trump 1.0. A lot of times when you hear from his AIDS, it's a little bit more of kind of what you what they might want his sort of vision of tariffs to be versus what they what what he actually is. In fairness, Trump did say yesterday, he talked about how the the reciprocal piece of this, not the sector specific he's sort of gung-ho on all of those, but that the the reciprocal country by country piece could be more conservative was his word, and that the countries could be pleasantly surprised. So there is a little signaling now from Trump that this that that piece of this could be peeled back a little bit, but it's still very there's still there's still clearly the end goal here for Trump is a kind of reordering of the trade system that I would agree with you guys that um markets aren't quite sort of embracing as as what he wants his legacy to be here.