Inflation Data and Unilateral Tariffs
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This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 7 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay or Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube. Patiently waiting is Frances Donald. Really can't say enough about her contribution to the measurement of American GDP. The first thing I did this morning, Frances, after the shock of the airplane crash is

is I went to the Francis Donald page, which is Atlanta GDP Now, and it's there at 3.7%, et cetera. And I just say to myself, it doesn't feel like a 3.7% economy. This is your wheelhouse. What kind of GDP growth are we...

in now and into the next two, three quarters. So maybe there's two questions there. There's what's our forecasted number? And then what is actually the trend growth underlying? And we are still very much in heavy distortions from tariffs. This is the number one issue facing all forecasters is that we've had massive front loading of activity into Q1. And you might remember that created distortions that led us to

the downside, and now we have some offsets coming through from that. And yet underlying the surface, we're probably growing around 1.5% to 2%. This is not a recession type of environment. It's a sub-trend type of environment. That'll be enough to inch that unemployment rate a little bit higher. But I've said this on the show before, Tom, there are two Americas happening right now, two American economies. There's the economy for the wealthy Americans, and then there's one for low- and middle-income Americans. They're very different.

Paul's looked at me and said, Tom, you're rude. Maybe I should properly introduce you. Ladies and gentlemen, Frances Donald. She is chief economist at RBC. Was that OK, Paul? That was good. Thank you. We saved ourselves. CPI yesterday came in a little bit benign. I think it was the term I heard most used yesterday.

What are you looking for at the producer level today in terms of inflation? Well, thank you for asking that question because yesterday was all about why isn't tariffs in the CPI data yet? We were not expecting the tariffs to be in the CPI data yet. You might remember back in 2018 with washing machines,

It took three to five months before we saw it show up. We talked a little bit about that front loading, lots of inventory builds over the past few months. Those inventories have to be depleted before we start seeing that show up in CPI data. But the question is, and I'm sure you've asked it to many guests, how much of this is going to get transferred

from producers and importers into consumers, and those metrics are very different. So CPI is one measurement of price pressures that will grow in the U.S. economy, but we have to use a dashboard, we have to use a basket to understand which sectors are being most impacted and which consumers, again, consumers very differently operating right now, are going to actually see those pressures come through.

When then do you think we'll see it, if we'll see it, in some of the numbers in terms of inflation? We get a couple more months. So later this summer, we might see that flow through. But here's the thing. When I look at inflation, yes, we care about tariffs. Tariffs could be as much as half a percentage point on top of CPI.

But I'm worried about inflation anyways. I'm not worried about growth in 2025. I'm concerned about some of the structural pressures that will mechanically push up inflation. I'm concerned that that OER, that shelter based on some of our models is going to stop falling. We had goods deflation and disinflation. We're not going to get that anymore.

So there is upward pressure on inflation heading into the later part of this year, tariffs or no tariffs. And as we talked about before on this show, I'm worried about some of these bigger structural issues in play, a very tight labor market that's not because the economy is booming, but because America needs workers, not jobs, very big government spending inside this pipeline in play and that wealthy consumer. So I get to high twos even without tariffs in play. And if we just focus on tariffs,

We're going to miss some of the story underneath. What's that do to economic growth for the U.S. here going forward? I mean, it seems like the recession talk is off the table. I haven't heard that too much in the last month or so. But still, should we be concerned about slowing economic growth in the U.S.? Well, maybe this is blasphemy for an economist, but I'm totally opposed to the recession, no recession call being the defining element of your outlook because you could have negative 0.1 GDP and it'd be a recession and plus 0.1 and it'd not be. Yeah.

The truth is this is not a great environment for most companies and households. So, yes, you'll have a job. You don't have to worry about losing your job. You've got to worry about your grocery bill. You've got to worry about rent prices that are coming up. Those savings are not as high as they were before. And even though there is wage growth, it's decelerating. So this is a muddle through type of environment. And that's going to be more problematic than actually sometimes I would prefer a short, quick reset recession and a reacceleration. This is not what this is.

Francis Donald with us with RBC, and we will continue. We welcome all of you on a very sober Thursday, a horrific plane crash in India. We just heard from Danny Lee in Bangkok. It seems to be now no survivors. We'll have to get more details later.

on that but we'll have more coverage john tucker leading our coverage here uh out on youtube and bloomberg podcasts and uh of course lisa mateo working on this as well and michael barr always on the news we welcome you on your commute across the nation we welcome you on youtube subscribe to bloomberg podcast growing each day in francis donald's canada good morning sirius xm channel 121 that older technology hugely

a popular. Francis, I want to synthesize this Thursday away from this terrible plane crash. The fact is the dollar is on the precipice. Now, I don't want to overplay it with dollar gloom, but the fact is I'm looking at the Bloomberg launchpad and there's tension there. The Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning on the trade story that Anne-Marie Horton covered in London,

This gets to the larger problem with Mr. Trump's tariff strategy, that is, he doesn't have one. Calculate the uncertainties of all these things we're bouncing off of into the math and the certitude of our economy. Can you get there?

Well, there's all sorts of measures of uncertainty and no surprising whatever measure you're using is at an all time high. And what that means for forecasters, but also for businesses, my clients, the CEOs that I talk to all the time. What do you hear from them?

But this uncertainty, it is not actual policy that is problematic here. Although, yes, there are some elements of it that are problematic. It's what is the game that we're playing? We cannot write the playbook until we know what the game is itself. And so forecasters and businesses are actually operating with much wider set of scenarios available to them. So you go into 245 Ouellette Avenue. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yeah.

I'm not sure. Windsor, Ontario? Windsor, Ontario, yeah. I think it's sort of like Edge of French, but it's in Ontario. I don't know. I'm lost. RBC branch in Windsor, Ontario. What's the confidence there to invest? I don't see it. Well,

Well, interesting you chose Windsor. Windsor has one of the highest unemployment rates in the entire country in Canada. It's at 11%. 11? 11% unemployment rate. But then if you were to head to the beautiful island of Victoria, B.C., you would find that the unemployment rate is 3%.

percent. What is this? This is what tariffs do and it's happening in America as well, which is that you're going to have sectors within the global economy, the U.S. economy, the Canadian economy that are operating in very real, I'll go back on my recession, no recession comment, very real recessions in pockets. So this is going to make policymakers lives very, very difficult because you can't ease rates for one place that's at 11 percent unemployment and hike rates for another place where it's at

three. So what we're trying to look for in a lot of the economic data right now in the United States and elsewhere is, do we see any evidence that there's bleeding outside of those specific trade sectors into the broader economy? We don't see that now, and we don't anticipate that that's going to happen, but it could. So when we look at a lot of this data from inflation to growth to jobs, there's two types of diagnosis. There is this sort of toxic cancer contained

or has it mustasticized? That's going to be the defining element between does the United States end up in a much worse situation this year, or can it be relatively well-contained, transitory, temporary, all those words we're not supposed to use. Francis, thank you so much. Francis Donald with us.

Chief Economist at RBC to get started on the morning here on the American economy. Of course, lots of economic data, that important CPI data yesterday. It was a surprise. PPI this morning, the business set of data under retail sales, I think it's Tuesday. I'm guessing. Yeah, Tuesday. Francis is looking at me. Dummy, you should know that. Thank you, Francis, for that.

If this government spending in defense goes towards things like R&D that have dual-use civilian purposes, you could get spillovers that actually end up enhancing productivity in Europe and so have a more long-lasting impact on growth.

To learn more about the intersection of national security and global trade, subscribe to PGM's The Outthinking Investor in your favorite podcast app.

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You're listening to the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 7 to 10 a.m. Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app or watch us live on YouTube. This is an honor. My book of the summer within the game is Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, Our Dollar, Your Problem. And what's so great is the academics of Rogoff University.

is so much the same, but at the same time different from the prodigious abilities of Richard Clare at Columbia University, and Pimco, the former vice chairman of the Fed. We're honored that he could join us here this morning.

The dollar is weaker. Our audience just simply sees Euro 116, Yen to 143. There's a crisis of confidence. The Wall Street Journal in an editorial today skewers, that's the right word, folks, skewers the president on his trade policy. If it's our dollar, your problem, whose problem is it this morning to see the dollar at the precipice?

I think there are a couple of things here. First, in agreement, you know, Canada is remarkable and it's a fantastic book. The dollar is a reserve currency. People hold it because it's a store of value. It's useful in trade and financial markets. It delivers privileges to the U.S., lower borrowing costs, and more importantly, the ability to borrow a lot more.

Tom, I do think we want to put this in context. I don't see-- and I don't think Ken does based on what he's written. I don't see the dollar losing that status in the next, say, five or 10 years simply because there's no viable alternative. But that doesn't mean the dollar is ever higher and ever stronger. So even a dominant reserve currency can have higher

and lower value and we may be in a period in which the dollar is is trending down not just against the euro a lot of currencies when you were at columbia did you work with hyman minsky was he before you uh yes hyman minsky was before he was before you yeah you were the young mondale mondale and and i i was with professor mundell but not minsky i know this is this is sacrilege but how does richard clare to link

Every central bank wants gold into our dollar confidence, and frankly, over to a June 18th meeting. I've never said this. Clarida on gold. Well, let me say this. I'm following this pretty closely because the purchases...

In the official data, the purchases of gold are large and they've been picking up. I'll share an anecdote with you. I was in Asia 10 years ago seeing a very sophisticated official investor, official institution investor. And we were talking about gold even then. This is like 2014, 2015. And that was in the context of QE Infinity.

And I said to him, "Well, why invest in gold? You can buy an inflation index security. It gives you a hedge against inflation." And he looked at me and he said, "Gold doesn't default."

And so I don't think the US is going to default either, but certainly we have seen that allocation. And again, talk about back to the future. I mean, central banks have been holding gold as a reserve for hundreds of years. And so we're sort of getting back into that mindset. So Paul, if gold doesn't default, like a gold wedding ring and a divorce, is that a default? Do you want to comment on that? No, thank you.

Rich, as a professor of economics at Columbia, when you have your class or your module on tariffs, how do you present tariffs to your students? Great question. Well, throughout most of my career, which dates back to the 1980s, tariffs have really not been front and center. Right.

So I actually typically did not teach on tariffs. I have brushed up on if I were to teach it how I would teach it. And what's interesting, if you look at MBER working papers, there have probably been a half dozen working papers in the last decade.

six months on tariffs and in the previous 40 years there were one or two zero so it is an interest to picking up but the short answer is tariffs of the scale and scope that that we're talking about now in the u.s are something we haven't seen in decades and they have implications for the economy across the board they generate revenue for the government um they

They divert some trade into the U.S. They onshore some investment. And so to actually take tariffs at the level that we're seeing now, say 10%, seriously, is a pretty complex modeling exercise with a lot of moving parts. So I'll leave it at that. So as we think about it here, we haven't seen rising inflation. No. We haven't seen materially slower economic growth. We see a lot of the

like the University of Michigan and so on, cite some concerns, but we haven't seen it in the hard numbers. How do you think about the hard data versus the soft data, which is something that we've now been introduced to? Great question, and let me just say up front, you have to acknowledge that in the last four prints, the January print were ugly, but February through May in the CPI have been coming in much better than expected. A lot of folks, including me, thought we would begin to see some of the tariff

show up in the CPI report we got yesterday because it's for the month of May. And in the month of May, the government was collecting a lot of tariff revenue and it did not. And as you mentioned, the economy seems to be holding in at roughly trend growth, the labor market holding in. So, so far, so...

uh... good uh... what it does tell me is at minimum we're not seeing in the data that u_s_ companies are using the tariffs as a reason or excuse to raise prices uh... preemptively uh... we may see that once tariffs go into go to in fact more broadly but yes so far uh... i think you have to acknowledge the u_s_ economy is holding up uh... quite well the former vice chairman of federal reserve system in a good conversation here with richard clare to

This morning, always with Columbia University and, of course, PIMCO as well. Trotting out yesterday, I'll give the FT credit. I can't remember quite where I saw it, is the John Edwards chart of two Americas. It is breathtaking on consumption, 70%, 69% in GDP, whatever, 50x%.

I believe is upper decile. It is shocking what upper quintile is. It is shocking what the bottom third is not consuming in America. Does Clarida economics work in the polarity of the American consumer? Are we so bipolar by barbell, if you will, that normal Fed talk doesn't work?

Tom, it does work, but you have to recognize that, as I think I've said on this show before, I think the simplest way to think about it is that two-thirds of Americans live in a home that they own, and around that percentage directly or indirectly own stock. So if you own your house and you own stock, you've had a great run for five, 15, 20, 30 years.

But if you don't own your own house, you don't own stock, you've been falling further and further behind. And that's at least a third, maybe more of the country. That is a factor in terms of the nuts and bolts of how the economy functions, how monetary policy is transmitted. So yes, clarity economics works in this world, but it only works if you acknowledge the divergence in those two parts of the economy.

rich if i'm your federal reserve i'm taking the summer off i'm going to the beach i'm not doing anything because the data doesn't mean i have to do anything is that a fair strategy here well i certainly don't think they're going to do anything next uh week um

Come on, you've got to talk it up. The Fed decides. Come on. Play it up. I don't think we're doing anything next week. But there will be a press conference, and I think the chair may use that as an opportunity to signal the direction of travel. You know, one thing I've picked up on in the last week or so is Fed speak not only from Chris Waller, but also President Bostick and President Goolsbee.

that does indicate at least to me that the committee may be open to what some have called a good news rate cut. So I have been in this camp, which is,

the Fed's only going to cut rates if something breaks. The unemployment rate goes up, GDP contracts again, simply because it looked like with the initial tariff announcement, the inflation hit would be so substantial. But given the better inflation data, and as I would point out, basic Clare de Galli-Gertler monetary policy rule right now would have the Fed cutting rates already. And so I think there is a case for them to begin to consider this.

That but I think the inclination probably will be to take the summer off and the time we got left and I won't turn this into a Columbia dissertation, but let's go 1951 McChesney Martin we basically yanked the Federal Reserve System away from the Department of Treasury We have a president who wants to yank it back. What stops President Trump from putting in fed leadership and

Fed governors that understand the buck stops at the Treasury building and not at the Echols building.

Great question, one that I thought about and lived through to some extent. I'll make a couple points. One, the president does nominate Fed officials, but to be confirmed requires a Senate confirmation process. The Senate is not a rubber stamp for Fed nominees. And so I think that's important. Also, to be candid, I think the market will have a say.

And particularly for Fed chair, and I don't think this will happen, but were the president to nominate someone who the markets believe would not be committed to price stability and would not be appropriately independent, I think you'd see stocks down, rates up. I wouldn't want to have my hair. I got to cut you off here. This is too important, Richard Clare. Are you going to get a 25 basis point pop yawner?

If we end up with a Trump chairman, are you talking about a stick where we get out over 5%? Rogoff even hinted towards 6% given selected events. Not a 25 basis point, Your Honor. A tangible lift.

Yes, yes. And weaker risk assets, stocks, credit spreads higher, yields higher. I just don't think it would stick because I wouldn't want to be a nominee coming into my hearing without market reaction to my... The other thing I'll say, Tom, and it's a little bit wonkish, but look, I'm on this show. I can be a little bit of a wonk, is Congress, occasionally Congress knows what it's doing. And back in the 30s when the Federal Reserve Act was modified and amended,

It was amended to disperse the authority for raising and lowering rates away from the chair towards a committee. So it's the Greenspan Fed, it's the Powell Fed, it's the Bernanke Fed. But by statute, rate decisions are made by a majority vote of a committee filed

Five of the 12 members of that committee are Reserve Bank presidents who are not appointed by the White House. Seven of them are obviously up and upholstering governors. And so I do think that the system has an intelligent design. And so I'm not that concerned about that outcome. But if it were to happen, I think Ken is right. With Catherine Mann of Brandeis holding court at the Bank of England, does the Bank of England get it right in a more fractured, spread out debate versus Greenspanian certitude in Washington?

A very astute comment because not all central banks have similar cultures. In fact, I remember a conversation with a senior Bank of England official said that he actually viewed it as a feature, not a bug, that in their system, the governor...

occasionally is on the losing side of an interest rate vote. The dissent, the culture of dissent there is much more accepted than at the Fed. There are dissents at the Fed. We've actually had some from some governors recently, but that is a difference. Brilliant. Richard Clare, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. With PIMCO, and of course, always with Columbia Economics. This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at 7 a.m. Eastern on Apple Podcasts.

Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station. Just say, Alexa, play Bloomberg 1130. I don't think Richard Clarida would be offended. The giant of DSGE at Columbia Academics.

If I said this is the most important conversation of the day for Global Wall Street, very difficult morning here with a plane crash. And Ian Lincoln joins us. He's with the Bank of Montreal. They are the definitive Canadian bank, essentially the Bank of England, the central bank of Canada, going back 150, 170 years. BMO Capital Markets. Ian Lincoln, you have a shockingly dense eight paragraphs today.

this morning on fixed income. Do you reaffirm here with a cacophony of the moment, a disinflationary vector? Can we drive the 10-year yield under 4% price up, yield down?

I actually certainly think at this stage, lower rates below 4% 10-year yields will emerge as a path of least resistance. Look at CPI yesterday. And as long as we don't see a material regime shift higher in realized inflation over the summer months, then by the end of the year, we're going to see that disinflationary trend reestablished and presumably the Fed back on the path of normalization. My question of the morning, including to Professor Clare, let me go to Professor Lingen.

How does a weak dollar fold into this? I have BBDXY folks, the Bloomberg Dollar Index, which is wicked good math. Good morning, 99FM in Boston. It's a wicked good series, Ian Lincoln, and I have weak dollar. Does that correlate with the Lincoln call of lower yields? Well, I'm not...

predicating my call on a return of the dollar to prior strength. But if we do take another, let's say, 3%, 5% lower in the value of the dollar, that means we're going to be importing more inflation. And so that means the core inflation series could be stickier than we're expecting. So it's a challenge to lower rates. But I don't think that it will definitively drive that story, given the trajectory of inflation at the moment.

Ian, what's your view of the consumer here? Again, 70% of the U.S. economy comes from the consumer as opposed to manufacturing. What's your view of the consumer here? At the moment, the consumer appears to be on surprisingly strong footing.

We know what happened during the pandemic. Anyone who could locked in a super low 30-year mortgage rate. And so there was a fair amount of capacity to consume. Now we're up against a rare moment.

for consumers where the dollar amount spent on mortgage interest is equal to the dollar amount spent on non-mortgage interest. So that means that a lot of net borrowers are starting to feel the pinch of higher rates in a way that we haven't seen in history. And that's a key index that we've been watching. If rates are higher, what happens? I mean, again, a lot of folks have a lot of credit card debt. They have a lot of mortgage debt.

I think that that's precisely the issue. Rates are higher. People need to make choices in terms of what they consume. If we find ourselves faced with another leg higher of inflation, that means in real terms that the consumer is going to be able to contribute less to growth.

So for the same nominal amount of growth, if prices are higher, you would have negative or a drag on real growth. That's going to be the biggest risk. And to close the loop here, I've got 20 seconds to get into important economic data. So you're just suggesting a lower real yield. I mean, the basic idea is the fear of a higher real yield is unfounded.

sustainably I think that that's right I think real rates are going to move lower between now and the end of the year certainly in 2026 and Beyond in across the board I have a disinflationary and a worse labor market tendency in this 30 uh this this Thursday data does it shift the Fed

I think that what it does is it keeps the Fed from signaling fewer cuts in 2025. If there was a case to only suggest there would be 25 basis points worth of rate cuts this year, I think this solidifies 50 basis points. So on net, it doesn't shift the Fed, but it does leave them somewhat nervous for the summer months for sure.

Ian, what's the greatest headwind to this U.S. economy here? It seems, again, I'm looking at the inflation data today, it doesn't seem to be, at least now, inflation.

I agree. It's not inflation. Frankly, I think that the one major headwind is the uncertainty introduced by the trade war. The rules keep changing. And as the rules keep changing, business leaders are struggling to know where to invest capital, struggling to know where and when to hire. And so they're simply staying on the sidelines. And that uncertainty can happen.

compound. And that's the biggest headwind and fear that I have at the moment. Ian Lingen, thank you so much. Greatly, greatly appreciate that. This one with BMO Capital Markets, he reaffirms a lower interest rate called price up, yield down.

If this government spending in defense goes towards things like R&D that have dual-use civilian purposes, you could get spillovers that actually end up enhancing productivity in Europe and so have a more long-lasting impact on growth.

To learn more about the intersection of national security and global trade, subscribe to PGM's The Outthinking Investor in your favorite podcast app. Thrivent can help you plan your finances for the people, causes, and community you love. What makes Thrivent different? Financial services and generosity programs are combined to help you build a financial roadmap for the future while also creating opportunities to give back along the way. Visit Thrivent.com to learn more.

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This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at 7 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal. Joining us now, incredibly well-timed with the uncertainties out there,

particularly on moving steel around and stuff like that. He's with Mercury at Resources. Anton Posner is with us in studio. Every time he's on, I wish it was longer, longer. Let's squeeze this in right now. What are we missing in the steel debate besides the romance of the 1962 steel strike or that? And the actual doing of steel. Hmm.

Where does America fit in right now? Yeah. Do we have a couple of hours at this point, Tom? Good morning. So good to be back. And, well, we saw recently, a couple of weeks ago, the announcement of the partnership, quote-unquote partnership, between Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel. So that's the big news in the steel industry. And at that same announcement that President Trump announced,

held during, at his visit to U.S. Steel, he announced new tariffs to go into effect, moving it up to 50% on import steel and aluminum, which was a bombshell for the industry initially.

off the cuff and that was going to go in effect. That was a Friday when he was at US Steel announcing that new partnership and investment that we don't have any details on yet, by the way. But it was told that we were going to start seeing import steel and aluminum tariffs moved up to 50% the following Wednesday. So we sprung into action

The workload between that Friday announcement and the Wednesday enacting of the tariffs was pretty frantic on our front, working in dealing with our domestic steel business, logistics and supply chain business, and the import steel business that we do to rush tariffs.

steel imports off ships that were already on the water and import to clear them before the new 50% tariffs went into effect. So we oversaw the deployment of import steel at ports where it was not supposed to be coming off of just to customs clear ahead of the new 50% tariffs. So we have steel out of place in a bunch of places. 50% is a big number. It's a big number. What...

Do we import a lot of steel? Is this going to impact? Who's it going to impact? How's it going to impact? It's a big number. Yeah, it's going to impact you, me, Tom. Yeah, exactly. Everybody and everybody else. Do we import a lot of steel as a country? We import a lot of steel. There's not enough. Now, do we import it because...

it's better for us to import it versus to make it here or we just can't make it here? Yeah, I'd say that's a more philosophical question. Of course, we want to have steel making capacity in the States for national security reasons. So I don't think there is anyone that would say that that's not a good idea.

The fact of the matter is as soon as those import tariffs were announced, first 25%, the domestic steel mills raised their prices sufficiently to take advantage of that. So that hits us all in terms of inflation and consumer spending and so forth. And import steel was still able to make sense even with the 25% because of the domestic.

Can I continue with dumb questions of the day? Yeah, this is the time to do it. This is the time. Is steel steel? Like if steel comes out of the romance of the Mongahela River in Pittsburgh or Nucor on some field in the middle of the Midwest somewhere or Texas, whatever.

I'm dumb on this. Is that the same steels from South Korea? Yes, same basic steel, right? There's lots of different grades, types, specialties. A given grade, steel is steel. Correct, right. It's made with iron ore. It's made with metallurgical coal. So you're having a beverage. You're having a Coke with President Trump right now. What's the Anton Posner...

intelligent steel strategy. My strategy, and I guess I'm announcing my candidacy for mayor. Well, no, not today. But anyway, we did the other day, right? I know. But anyway, here's the thing.

We all want more investment in American industry, whether it's steel, whether it's aluminum. We could talk about aluminum for another two hours also. But it can't, investment's not going to happen based on a tweet or a truth social, right? How's it going to happen? It's going to happen by putting legislation in effect. It's going to take rolling up the sleeves and hard legislative work. So we need a state...

policy to compete with the state policy of South Korea. Right. It's state policy to incentivize actual investment. You can't... Credits? LBJ-like credits? There's credits, there's support on energy, there's working with the unions to make it... There's infrastructure and supply chain issues, right? Why can't we do that?

Because we're in a cycle where our election cycle is based on soundbites. Right. So I'm going to get a little bit get a little bit off on that area. But, you know, we're competing geopolitically. We're competing against countries that don't have elections. Right. And that can make elections.

five, 10, 25 year strategic plans on critical minerals and steel. - I went to lunches with Nucor two lifetimes ago. And there was a complete panic about steel dumping.

Is there steel dumping going on right now? Sometimes there is in certain types of steel and markets. It's very specialized. That question, Tom, is very specialized. You might be talking about rebar. You might be talking about wire rod coil or hot roll coil. Rebar, manly rebar. Rebar, it's a big part of our business. Can you come back tomorrow? You want to just give me a regular bit?

Tell the intern from Duke to wake up in there. Maybe we can get Anton back here. This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live each weekday, 7 to 10 a.m. Eastern, on Bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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