Simon Jack

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

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Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

20.33

Yep, we're talking about Marcus Persson, the Swedish coding king who programmed the world's most successful game, Minecraft, all by himself.

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

2004.011

On our podcast, Good Bad Billionaire, we explain how the world's billionaires made all their money.

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

2018.197

Yep, we're talking about Marcus Persson, the Swedish coding king who programmed the world's most successful game, Minecraft, all by himself.

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

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His stated goal is basically to reduce the trade deficit. He's saying that Americans are fed up of buying more from the rest of the world than the rest of the world buys from the U.S., And in, for example, in the EU, that example you just hit there, he says they don't take our cars, whereas the EU export in Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMWs there.

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

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So that's the overall picture to try and reduce that imbalance. However… The U.S. is not an isolated economy. And, you know, we have comparative trade. Some people are better at producing some things and some people are better than others. And so most economists fear that this has two effects. It can push up prices for U.S. consumers and it can reduce growth or a bit of both.

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

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And if you talk to business leaders in the U.S., what they tell me is that it's getting very hard to plan what we're going to do because I don't know what my supply chain is going to cost. Even Donald Trump has conceded that there will be what he called disturbances.

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

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And you've seen some of that in business sentiment and also in the financial markets, which have seen a 10% pullback, which is a very significant move in US markets since the height we saw earlier this year. So markets are kind of freaked out. I think what they're also nervous about is

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

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is the fact that there used to be something known in financial circles as the Trump put, which is, if you like, a bit of insurance policy. And it was the idea that if markets freak out a bit, then that would modify behavior and Donald Trump would back off a bit. But that doesn't seem to have happened.

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

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This kind of one foot in, one foot out, this hokey-cokey on tariffs is sapping business confidence and, you know, with people not knowing how they can plan on an hour-to-hour basis, given how volatile this is.

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

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That's exactly right, because we've been down this road before, Andrew. We've had, for example, steel tariffs, and then we had the EU and the UK putting tariffs on things like bourbon, whiskey, Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Global News Podcast

EU retaliates as Trump tariffs expand globally

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What's very interesting about the EU response, the EU's retaliated, the UK and Australia have not, but the EU, interestingly, have given them a 1st of April deadline for when these reciprocal tariffs come in, giving him enough time to change his mind, which, as we've seen, he has wanted to do from time to time.