Talking Points: "Liberation Day," Business Investment, and the overall Economy

Media Hit, 3/27/25

I’m on NewsMax in a little bit here, talking about tariffs and the economy. My talking points will largely be the same as always.

Here are the links:

• https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tariffs-april-2-prices-economy/story?id=120126876

• https://apnews.com/article/stocks-markets-trump-rates-inflation-352fd536517d6824d7006c429651e3a2

• https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/hyundai-motor-company-ceo-talks-21-billion-investment-us

Tariffs and Liberation Day

• On net, I think President Trump’s second term can be characterized as “liberating.”

• He’s reducing regulations, lowering taxes, combating gang violence, and cutting federal responsibilities across the board.

• This is very good and I suspect that, once history has a chance to cool down a little bit, he’ll go down as a decent-to-good president.

• But if he wants to go down as a GREAT president, then he needs to stop with this tariff stuff.

• While he can point to a few successes here and there, the overall effect of these on the US people, not just the economy, has not been good in the past, is not good right now, and will not be good in the future.

Stock Market Woes

• Big Tech falling, including Nvidia, US automaker stocks falling…

• This all does not sound like “winning” as laid out by Trump on the campaign trail.

Hyundai Investing in America

• Announced $12.6 billion investment in building new manufacturing capacity in the US.

• Another $21 million in the next few years as well.

• A few thoughts:

  • We’ll have to wait and see how much of this actually happens. This wouldn’t be the first time a foreign firm promised massive investments in the US and then just… didn’t do it, for one reason or another.

  • Let’s not count our chickens before they hatch

• The $21 billion investment is quite large. It’s not clear how much of this was planned prior to Trump versus lately.

• But this also takes people away from other sectors of the economy.

  • Places like healthcare, which is projected to have a massive shortage of doctors in the next few years, making it harder for people to get care, even if they can afford it.

So What Happened?

I was joined by Frances Stacy, an Economic Strategist at Financial Oak Financial Services. Overall, I thought it went well. I had one gaffe where I worded something poorly, but recovered well and pivoted to talking about my experience with, in this case, the tariffs.