The market is really misunderstanding Trump. This trajectory is very clear. There's going to be higher tariffs. The goal is to try to reshape the global trade system so that the US is producing more manufactured goods themselves. You're going to have higher tariffs on a broader range of goods. That's not good for the stock market, right? Financial markets just don't like tariffs because a lot of people who benefit from this globalization are the mega caps. Those companies are going to suffer. Those stocks are going to suffer and those stocks are in the big equity indexes. If we would have huge tariffs tomorrow, the markets would take that with tight and financial conditions and that would, at the end of the day, in my view, lead to rapid rate cuts. That's my base case for this year. Are you bullish on bonds and bearish on stocks right now? Absolutely.
This episode of Monetary Matters is brought to you by the Vanneck Uranium and Nuclear ETF. Explore how nuclear energy can play a role in your portfolio at Vanneck.com slash NLR Jack. I'm joined by my friend Joseph Wang, author of Central Banking 101, former senior trader for the New York Federal Reserve and publisher at FedGuide.com. Joseph, it is great to see you. Welcome back to Monetary Matters. Hey, Jack. Great to see you. Thanks so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. As always, Joseph, the pleasure is mine. How are you thinking about Trump's endgame with tariffs? Particularly, you have a piece out called The Plan about Trump and Trump, the Trump Administration's plan to reshape the global economic order. Lay out this plan for us and share your thoughts on it, please. Wow. I think the market is really misunderstanding Trump because his plan, and I've been following Trump for a long time and I've been reading up on many of his advisor and pointees. One of them is our friend Stephen Moron, who has a great piece, basically detailing how they're thinking about this.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to exactly do, as what they've said, but I think the trajectory is very clear. There's going to be higher tariffs and the goal is to try to reshape the global trade system so that the US is producing more manufactured goods themselves. Now this is just for employment, but also for national security reasons because the US doesn't want to be dependent on a lot of goods abroad. Now a lot of people are looking at this and I think the market is thinking that this is all bluster, this is just negotiation. Trump won't really do that because he loves the stock market and this is not good for the stock market. And that's all true. He does love the stock market and crypto coins apparently. But if you look at President Trump, he's been saying the same thing about trade for decades. You can find videos of him in the 1980s, just telling everyone that this trade thing is not working out, we're not doing a good job.
And during his first term as president, we also know that he did put on tariffs on China and that was surprising to many people in the markets. Now it's the same person, he hasn't changed and he is in office again and he's hired a team of people who share his beliefs. Now in addition, if you listen to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, now he'll say that tariffs are indeed one of the reasons is for negotiation. You saw that just that last week when in order to get Colombia to set their repatriation of their own citizens, Trump, and terrorists and that was effective. But Secretary Bessent also noted that tariffs are also one as a source to reshape the global trade order, but also to collect revenue as well. And this is the last two points I think the market is not appreciating.
And it's also because of those two points that we necessarily have to have wide and higher tariffs rates than before. And so it's not just going to be something that people can promise. And I think this trade problem they're trying to address is completely legitimate as well. If you look at China, for example, most recently they had a trade surplus of about a trillion US dollars. Now that's just mind-boggling, right? They're selling so much more stuff to the rest of the world than they're importing and at the end of the day they're left with a trillion dollars. That's not really how trade should work. Because in theory, if you're making so much money from abroad, you would take some of that money and buy some goods from abroad, right? And so that would have some mitigating impact on your trade surplus. Or if you're making so much money, that would cause your currency to strengthen, make your exports less competitive.
And that would also mitigate some of that trade surplus. But none of these mechanisms are balancing that trade channel. And we see the Chinese trade surplus go higher and higher and higher. And that's because they have a state sponsored policy to basically create jobs at home, make goods, and export them abroad. And it's been very effective, right? So a lot of ways you can see this is that they manage their currency to make sure that their goods are competitive. And of course, if you are a, some sectors in China get very cheap loans, depending on what their industrial policy is.
Recently, we see that their electric vehicle manufacturing sector has basically surged the produce excellent products. But they're able to develop in large extent because of all the state sponsorship, protectionism, and a cheap currency. And now China is the largest exporter of cars in the world surpassing even Japan. So in a sense, in the West, people are talking about free trade, having a larger degree of free trade than China. But other people are not playing by these rules. And we end up in a situation where all the manufacturing jobs go to abroad and in domestically, we become more vulnerable both from supply chain standpoint.
And a lot of people just don't have a future anymore. So that's a big problem that President Trump has been trying to address. I think it's something that is legitimate as well. We all see how manufacturing has left our country. We all see the rise in a drop in labor force participation for certain demographics. So I think that's a big solution they're trying to solve. That's one point in trying to rebalance the global trade order. The other has to do with revenues. So historically speaking, in the United States, the federal government was very small and it collected most of its revenue from tariffs.
Actually having a federal income tax, which is how the federal government collects most of its revenues today was illegal. It was only after a constitutional amendment that we could actually change the system such that we could actually have federal income tax. So right now what Trump seems to be wanting to do, and he's been saying this over and over again, again, these are things that are consistent. So it's not just things that he would easily forget. He says that tariffs are making us wealthy. And then he's like, you know, we're going to collect a lot of tariffs, make sure that if you don't make an America, you are going to have to pay tariffs.
Now this is particularly acute because a lot of the people around him, like Elon, care a lot about the federal deficit. And Trump of course also wants to extend his tax cuts. Now in order to do that, you have to collect more revenue and that can be done through higher tariffs. And so that is very much part of the plan as well. And so if you look, if you're looking at a world that no matter what the negotiating outcome is, you're going to have higher tariffs on a broader range of goods. That's not good for the stock market, right? Because a lot of people who benefit from this globalization are the mega caps and the mega caps live in the big indexes.
One thing I'll add is that annually the US imports about $3 trillion worth of goods. The volume weighted, a tariff rate for that is about 2.2%. So tariffs are very low and they definitely have room to go up. So you think Trump is going to raise tariffs regardless of negotiations. What level, what percentages are they going to go up to, do you think? And are they going to be inflationary? Are they going to reduce growth? Are they going to do both? Are they going to do neither? What do you think? So tariff is kind of a blunt weapon, but from what I've seen, he uses it for a few purposes. One of them is for negotiation, like the Columbia example. Now right now, what's on mind is that Trump has been 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada to take place this Saturday unless he gets his some border security, all stuff.
Now that part, that part I think is definitely negotiation. So I was listening to Secretary of Commerce nominee Howard Ludnick yesterday and he breaks it down. So these tariffs that we're talking about with Canada and with Mexico, these are negotiating tariffs to try to get them to have more border enforcement and also to stop the flow of fentanyl. But the economic tariffs, the ones that we're going to have just for, you know, to reshape the trade order, to collect revenue, those things are going to come later. The reason is that these come through a different legal process. It's called Section 301 in order to put those tariffs on.
You have to have some paperwork, some studies. And so those are probably going to come in April. Whereas these Senate tariffs, these are under the International Economic Emergency Powers. So all that, all the sass has happened is for the president to declare an emergency that then, you know, it's kind of, it's a different set of legal powers. So right now, we, well, now what we expect, well, what he's talking about are these negotiating based tariffs, the economic tariffs are going to come later on in the term. So whether or not this is going to be inflationary, well, first, I think we can talk about this in a couple of ways in practice and in theory.
Now, in practice, we've already had a wave of tariffs. We saw that in 2018, 2019. And if you look at PCE inflation back then, inflation was below target. Now a lot of people have been studying this episode now and they come to the conclusion that it actually wasn't inflationary. So a team of researchers and one of the people there was Jita Gopadov of the IMF. And so you know, this is a legit paper. They went online, they looked through prices of over a hundred thousand products and they found that, you know, this tariff episode was not inflationary for the consumer. But prices did go up though because of the tariff. So what happened, well, what happened was that the companies ate that cost. So they had lower margins and did not pass it on to consumers.
So right now that episode that we had with Trump, the first term was that there were tariffs and they were not inflationary at full stop. Now in theory though, there's a lot of layers that shares have to go to where they can be inflationary and don't necessarily have to be. One first layer of course is the currency layer. So let's say we put tariffs on China. Oh, what's been happening is that the dollar has been strengthening it a lot, right? So if we have higher input prices, the stronger currency mitigates part of that. So that's one layer. The other layer is as we've been talking about, is that instead of the businesses passing on those higher prices, those tariffs to consumers, they can eat the cost.
And that's totally reasonable and potent and could be possible today because from what we're hearing right now from earnings calls is that a lot of the consumers, a lot of the companies can't pass on to the consumers because the consumers, their consumers are tapped out. So they say, so that could be a possibility. And a third of course is that, and we hear Secretary Bessin talk about this, is that consumers seeing that input prices, inputted goods are more expensive, simply substituted to domestically produced ones. So all in all, it's totally possible that these tariffs can be inflationary, not necessarily so. So it's a complicated question.
Now, one more to the point for people who care about markets is how does that impact the Fed? Now, the Fed is in a kind of an interesting spot here because traditionally speaking, if you have tariffs, it's a one-time increase in the price level. It's not, it's transitory inflation as has been commonly said. And so we know in a memo in 2018 that the Fed basically looked at this that way. You have tariffs, inflation is transitory. We should look through this and not react. Today, I suspect they'll do the same. The one wrinkle was that people have been saying that inflation expectations are a little bit higher than before, and we just came out of an inflationary episode. So maybe they shouldn't look through this.
But now listening to Powell yesterday, he believes that inflation expectations are well anchored. Maybe he has to say that, I don't know, but as long as that's true, the Fed would likely look through any one-time increases in the price level. Joseph, you said that the Federal Reserve looked at it in 2018 and they said that a lot of the tariffs were not inflationary. No, no, no, no. Okay. And they're a memo. So there's two studies. One study is the one that I cited earlier. That's looking at the post-mortem. There was 100,000 prices looked at. Tariffs were not inflationary. The 2018 memo that I'm talking about is the Fed thinking how they should react if two tariffs, and the thinking was that as long as inflation expectations were anchored, they should look through this because it's a one-time upward adjustment in the price level.
What percentage did it find? If a tariff caused a hundred billion dollars, how much of that went to actual price increases, how much was from the dollar strength thing and how much was from producers just eating the cost? So that's a really complicated question. Now, to be clear, looking back to 2019-2018, there were specific products where prices did increase for consumers, specifically washing machines, and there's an entire paper devoted to that. But again, if you look at the totality of the prices and if you look at price indexes, like CPI, PCE, you'll see that it really wasn't inflationary because the businesses ate the cost. That won't necessarily be true in the future and how future tariffs feed into inflation that's going to depend upon the rates, how broad it is, what it's implemented on, what countries and so forth. So it's all up in the air. There is a potential for it to be to increase the price level. I'm just telling you that it's not clear that it will. This is a different environment than 2018 and 2019.
As you said, inflation was below the Fed's target. Now it's above the Fed's target. And Joseph, as we know, there are a lot of no landingistas who were worried that inflation wouldn't go back to 2% before tariffs. The argument for the Fed to react to tariffs is that inflation is above target, as you note, Jack, and also inflation expectations are a little bit higher than they were before. And so in order to keep to prevent people from overreacting, in order to maintain inflation expectations, the Fed should react to this.
That's possible. It doesn't seem like that's how they're going to react to it as well. Again, like I mentioned before, the standard central banking playbook to these one-time increases in the price level is to look through them because it's not a change in inflation. It's not a change in the rate of change of prices, simply a change in the price level. So that's how I would say that. Another thing that I would note, and to be clear, the way that I see the market is that the market seems to think of tariffs as inflationary. So when I see tariff headlines, it seems like interest rates go up, saw the same thing in 2018, and that ended up to be totally wrong. And as we've discussed for over the years, Jack, the bond market is often wrong and sometimes by a lot.
One of the things that I would be careful of is to know that although tariffs could put upward pressure on prices, they could also put downward pressure on growth. And what we saw in 2018 and 2019 was that those growth concerns were actually much stronger than the inflation concerns. And that ultimately ended up with the Fed cutting in 2019. Now in 2018, December, I remember that the Fed had a dopplot that was getting towards a couple of hikes in 2019. They ended up actually cutting in large part because of the growth concerns that were related to tariffs. So my instinct is actually to say that tariffs are very bullish bonds because their impact on growth, much, much bigger than their impact, if any, on inflation. And I'll also note that the financial markets just don't like tariffs.
I think like we discussed earlier, if you have tariffs that impacts the big multinationals the most, those are the companies that have revenues all over the world. Those are the companies that benefit from globalism. And as we retreat from that, those companies are going to suffer, their stocks are going to suffer, and those are the big equity indexes. So market reacts much, much, much quicker to these tariff developments than the real economy. Once you put tariffs on, that has to go into the price changes to businesses. That's a slow real economy process. But the markets are lightning quick. So if we were to have huge tariffs tomorrow, the markets would take that would tighten financial conditions. And that would, at the end of the day, in my view, lead to rapid rate cuts. And that's my base case for this year. So the market financial markets react much quicker to tariffs or tariff headlines than the actual economy, which takes months, even years to adjust.
So you think tariffs may not, you know, or they're only slightly inflationary. They may not be inflationary at all. But you have much greater confidence in saying that tariffs actually reduce growth. Why do tariffs reduce growth? Because if the United States puts a tariff on China, US consumers consume more, they do, they substitute Chinese goods for American goods, so they buy more American, so more production in America. And also imports is a negative in GDP. It's exports minus imports. So that doesn't that boost GDP? Why is tariffs bad for growth? Yeah, that's a great point. I think it depends on your timeframe in the short term. I think it's definitely bad for growth because let's say you're a US company, you're relying upon many of your parts come from other countries, there are supply chains all throughout the world. Once you have tariffs, that whole part is disrupted. You don't know how to invest. You don't know how to price your products. And you know the price is going to go maybe higher or you're going to have less profit. And so that all impacts business confidence. However, longer term, if the prices of imported goods are structurally more expensive, that means that we're going to have to have more manufacturing in the US. And President Trump has made a big effort to try to make that as easy as possible. A big move he has is cutting regulation, which I think of as cutting costs. The other of course is his hope that we could have lower corporate taxes. And later on probably the ability to, easier ability to import skilled labor. So in the medium term, because prices are higher broad, that encourages production within the US. And of course the federal government is going out across the world trying to court investment. We see Saudi Arabian government wanting to make investments in the US. We have Masasana, Japan investing in the US. So as we build out that industrial base in the US in the medium term, that creates jobs. That could, that means more goods and services are produced. So that's good for growth. But that's the medium term thing. In the short term, I expect it to be very disruptive.
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Joseph, do you buy the economic model, believe by most economists, the very simple model of you have supply and demand. I know you and I, we haven't thought about supply and demand curves for a long time. And most people in financial markets do not think about supply and demand curves. But you have your supply and demand curve. And then if you impose tariffs, basically you get dead weight loss. And which is basically the gains from trade, you no longer get. And economists think that trade is good. Do you believe in that, in that model?
So I have learned over time that the tools and theories of economics is not super useful in understanding the world. I mean, we've, we've looking through this for the past few years, right? All these economists came out with their models and told us guys, there's no inflation. It's transitory to go away. But that was totally wrong, right? And then they all came up with their models and told us that when you hike rates to 5%, you're going to have a recession. 99%, right? No recession. GDP numbers today were quite good. We have to be careful with anything that we get from the economist community. Now, I think that's true.
So I studied economics both on the undergrad and in graduate school as well. So you're right that the economic orthodoxy is that, you know, free trade is good, tariffs are bad. But we can just do a real life experiment to see how these countries that did a lot of tariffs, a lot of protections are doing. China is the prime example, right? They have not just a lot of tariffs and productionism. They even have a managed currency, right? US companies want to sell them to China, not that easy. Chinese companies selling it to US much, much easier. And what they've done over the few decades is create a world class manufacturing sector and it lifted literally hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. So that is kind of a huge, huge, easy example to, to let you know that, you know, this standard economics model about trade, maybe it's missing something.
So I'm really hesitant to buy into that orthodoxy since so much of that stuff has proven, have been shown to be not accurate. And Trump believes in tariffs. He's a big fan of President McKinley, who had hiked tariffs to a huge rate. So your point, Joseph, is tariffs are coming, whether you like them or not. And would you say that the financial markets are complacent in terms of Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, maybe not Nvidia, but many other big companies that rely hugely on trade and they're near or at their all time highs that the stock market is complacent and that is not appropriately assessing the risk that tariffs will come. 100%. That is the equity market, I think is totally, totally mispriced, especially some companies that are highly reliant on international trade.
Apple, for example, makes basically everything in China. Now, I think tariffs are going to be really disruptive for them. So, but, you know, my sense is that the market actually, oh, also Nvidia as well as some policy risk. I think yesterday there was some headline where the Trump administration seeing that DeepSeek is the Chinese AI company, DeepSeek is doing so well, seems to want to throttle China's progress by imposing more limits on who Nvidia can sell to. So there's a lot of political risk there. But yeah, I don't think all these concerns are in the market. Now, to be totally clear, the market is often very slow.
I remember in 2020, for example, we were seeing this pandemic in China, it was really bad and the market continued to go up one day until it didn't. And DeepSeek, for example, people in the know have done about DeepSeek for weeks and then just one day over the weekend, the market realizes that and reacts. So I think the market is just being slow again and, you know, that happens a lot as I've shown. Yeah, and people, analysts at Hetchumun and investment firms who were telling their boss, you got to sell Nvidia because DeepSeek is coming. If they've been saying that for four months, they've been wrong for four months. So they might have been chastised for their boss, even though they were right, but they were early, which is the same as being wrong. Exactly, exactly. The timing is really hard to get, but they were eventually right.
Joseph, what did you think of the January Federal Reserve meeting? We had, what I thought was a hawkish statement in two terms. It lacked the phrase, we're making progress on inflation. It also said that the unemployment rate has stabilized. So you're not concerned about the job market and you're no longer saying progress on inflation. That sounds like not a lot of cuts to come. So what do you think about that as well as, did Jay Powell in the press conference 30 minutes after? Did he seemingly contradict or downplay, you know, the Colby Spist of the New York Times asked about that hawkish language and he said, oh, no, don't worry about that. Just, you know, we were just changing a few words around.
Yeah, Jack, I agree. I think the statement did sound hawkish and you saw the bond market. So yields rise in response to that. And the statement did seem hawkish, right? There are two things like we know, the Fed care is about two things, full employment and price stability. Now, the statement basically upgraded the view of the labor market and seemed to downplay the recent progress and inflation we've had by deleting a phrase saying that we've been making progress towards our target. And so taken together unhappiness with inflation, strong labor market that immediately suggests the hawkish tilt. But when asked about that, Chair Powell was like, yeah, you know, we just had too many words in that sentence. So so I removed some. I don't know that that was persuasive. I don't know. I mean, so some people are whispering that maybe that statement is the one that he could get everyone to agree on.
And now in the press conference, he just kind of puts his own spin on it because my sense is that Paul was pretty dovish today. He's the last press conference in December was pretty surprising to me in that he described the stickiness inflation as this new category of non-tradable services, right? So that's kind of what you do. So when the data is not what you want it to be, you kind of make caveats and you create new categories. And that seems to be what he did. And that just tells me that he really thinks that inflation is over and he's downplaying the data. So that is his bias. He's biased towards to be more dovish and maybe that's what he's trying to do at the press conference. And I'm I wasn't at the FOMT meeting, so I don't know. But that is possible as well.
But overall, the other thing that was interesting was his remarks on QT. So as we know, the Fed is shrinking its balance sheet. Now the whole discussion at the FOMC conference was, you know, pretty conversation. We have Paul being himself just kind of talking with people. But that one moment when he was asked about QT, what he did was he kind of, you know, look for some prepared statement. So when that happens, that tells me that this is something you thought about, something that he doesn't want to get wrong. And it was kind of somewhat of a formal statement. So that was kind of his policy there telling everyone that QT is going to go on for some time.
So if in, let's say, 2022, early 2023, the FOMC was more dovish than Paul. And Paul, in some instances, spoke against the statement and he talked in a way that was more hawkish than the statement. Now you're saying it's the reverse, whereas the statement's kind of hawkish. He's talking, he's really dubbing it up in front of the microphone. So Paul is more dovish than the FOMC. That's my belief. I mean, we can see this in a couple of other ways. Well, we've had the sense in the last meeting, right? Some people weren't happy with continuing to cut rates. So there are people on the committee that are more hawkish than Paul and who are not afraid to express it.
Now, Paul, I think, is really dovish now. But again, he wants to have consensus. And so in order to have consensus, sometimes you have to make some compromise in order to get the statement that you want. Again, I don't know if this is the case. What I do feel pretty confident about is that Paul's bias here is towards cuts. Yeah. And that question about quantitative tightening, I believe it came from Courtney Brown of Axios. Paul's exact words, I don't have them here, but he said something to the fact of reserves are still roughly abundant and they reserves are where they were when we started quantitative tightening, I believe in 2022. That was the predetermined statement.
So the reserves are the liabilities of the Federal Reserve, the assets of commercial banks. And why have reserves, if the Federal Reserve has been reducing reserves by letting the balance sheet roll off, why are reserves where they were almost three years ago? Oh, the RFP has been coming down. So as the RFP comes down, that money could go to the TGA or it could go to the baking sector, but the RFP is almost at zero, right? So that's been countering a bit of the quantitative tightening. But looking at the RFP, it looks like it's probably going to go towards zero sometime in the, well, a lot of it depends on the debt ceiling, of course, but after the debt ceiling is resolved, it looks like it's going to go towards zero as we have more bill issuance.
And at that point in time, I think the Federal probably more seriously think about when to stop QT since the RFP is to them, one of the indicators of having excess reserves in the system. So the reverse repo facility is now at 121 billion. That's like two or three months of Federal Reserve QT roll off. So it's basically nothing. Joseph, looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, when there was over $2 trillion in the reverse repo facility, wasn't it kind of ridiculous that people were saying that there's no money, though we're running out of money? I think it's like there was $2 trillion in the system. Yeah, it's a lot of money.
I mean look at where the stocks are, right? So I think there's a lot of money chasing assets right now. And some of it is not very sophisticated. So it's a dangerous time, I think, in a lot of the risk markets. And Joseph, I'm asking a simple question to which the answer is very complex. Where is the money coming from that's been going into the stock market, going into private equity, going into private credit, going into fart coin, Trump coin? Where is this money coming from? So like we've talked about over the past few years, I think of one of the forms of money is just treasuries, right? Treasuries are just money that pays interest. And we still have a tremendous fiscal deficit, right? It's still 6%, 7%. And that was a key driver behind my call, but 6,000 S&P 500 last year.
Now that continues, but it seems like there's more and more of an effort to stop that. Now, I don't know if they will be successful in raining in fiscal spending, but it's possible. At the very least, they're making an effort to try. So with Elon is trying to system the federal government down by offering buyouts to employees, Trump is trying to raise tax collection by through tariffs. And so that is something that could change going forward. But until then, I think this tremendous fiscal deficit is sustaining a lot of the asset price buoyancy we see.
And of course, prices are to large psychological and a lot of people have been making a lot of money in the market. And I think that kind of positive sentiment is also driving prices up a lot. And so people have been finding the money to buy stocks, buy risk assets. What about bonds? Where do you think the buyers of bonds are going to be as the US Treasury is going to continue to run a huge deficit, regardless of even if it decreases or we do cuts, it still will be a sizable deficit. Who's going to buy the bonds?
Well, if we have big tariffs, everyone is going to be buying those bonds because that's going to have a very, very strong risk off episode. And I think that is going to drive a huge bull market, not a huge bull market, a huge surge of buying in the bond market. So I'm not really worried about that. Now to your broader point, the US deficit is very large. We're going to find these buyers. I'm less worried about that now because my sense is that the secretary of best understands that you can create demand in many different ways.
Now I've heard this discuss, for example, just changes in regulation. One thing he mentioned was taking off the asset cap of Wells Fargo, which for bad behavior has been prohibited from growing over the past few years. You take that asset cap off, Wells Fargo could grow and maybe they'll buy some bonds. And as we know that Trump will be able to appoint a vice chair of supervision at the Fed.
It's probably going to be Michelle Bowman. And she is someone who is, I think, very lenient on big regulation. So you have changes in bank regulation. Again, to be clear, the Trump administration can also have appointments on the FDIC and the office of the control of the currency. To change bank regulations, you need all three agencies. So he has the power to change that, to make it so that banks are more inclined to buy trophies.
So I think that actually solves that problem, or at least it can be solved. In the near term, I think the downturn in risk assets would drive a lot of flows in the bond market in the medium to longer term. I think they can fix this through regulation since they have the tools and the understanding. So I'm not worried about that. And if the foreign sector is earning less dollars because their trade surplus is lower, are they going to be a smaller buyer of US treasury bonds? And how will the splits go? Talk about just the different preferences of foreigners like bonds and US equities in your work there.
So we talk about foreigners. There's a foreign official sector, so the foreign central banks. And there's also the foreign private sector, like, say, a Japanese insurance company. Now the foreign central banks really haven't been the buyers of strategies for some time, actually. The marginal buyers in the foreign sector have been the private sector. And I think it's understandable. US rates are a lot higher than they are in many other countries.
Now I would expect, actually, as the Fed cuts rates and the Treasury curve steepens, that we'd actually have more foreign private sector buyers because then the cost of hedge currencies becomes lower. And so it becomes more attractive for them to buy strategies on an FX hedged basis. Looking at the equity markets, now, one thing that's been really standing out to me is that the foreign exposure to US equities is just tremendous. It's enormous. It's like mind-boggling. In part, it's because we have AI.
We've been in a huge bull market. In part, it's because the valuations of US stocks have gone up a lot. Now that's kind of an anomaly, I think, that could potentially reverse if we have some changes in the AI narrative. But what this tells me, though, linking this to policy, is that the Trump administration's potential policy of having a weaker dollar to boost manufacturing could potentially crash the US asset market because we know that there's a lot of foreigners with exposure to dollars, both in the Trojan market, fixed income, corporate bonds, AGC, and B.S., and in a huge way to equities today.
And if they were to understand that Trump wants to make the dollar cheaper, the weaker, to boost exports, well, what are you going to do? Do you want to take currency losses, maybe 10 percent? No, you want to get ahead of that, right? So you got to sell your equities, take your page rate back to Japan or wherever. So you want to have to get out of the market before they pose those currency losses on you. So that's a huge risk. And I hope they don't. So I understand the need to have a weaker dollar to kind of boost you with experts. And maybe that is necessary.
But I'd be very careful over there because if you were to do that, you could have very largely declined in dollar assets as all the foreigners try to avoid FX losses. And do you think the dollar will weaken? Because isn't the dollar supposed to strengthen because of tariffs? Yeah. It has been, right? It has been. And it has been. And it's easy to see why. Like for example, looking at the Eurozone, if Trump were to impose tariffs on the Eurozone, that's not good for other economy, right? They are an export dependent economy. That means the ECB cuts rates more than the Fed, interest rate differential widens, and so the week Euro weakens dollar strengthens. So that has been the reaction.
But currency policy is something that can be politically determined. Now, in the US, currency policy files under the purview of the US Treasury. And we've seen this in action before, right? Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. It's within his park to do that. And we also have the Plaza Accord in the 1980s, where the US basically went to Japan and said, hey, you're again, is too cheap. I want you to strengthen it. And if you don't do that, I'm going to put huge tariffs on you and Japan complied. So the Trump administration has the tools to weaken the dollar that I don't doubt at all. So whether or not they actually use them, I don't know. It seems like they have to though simply because it's part of their grand plan of reshaping the global trade order. But this is another reason why I'm very cautious on equities right now.
And I think the biggest trade partner is China. President Trump hasn't been talking about tariffs on China. He's mainly threatening them on Mexico, Canada, and more recently, Colombia. Do you have any idea on that as well as what's going to be the impact of tariffs on our regional partners like Canada and Mexico? So the tariffs against Mexico and Canada said to take place to the Saturday. These are tariffs like Howard Ludwig mentioned at his confirmation hearing. These are tariffs just to make sure basically to bully them and to not taking care of the fender's no problem. My guess is that they'll comply. Mexico certainly, Canada, I'm not too sure. It seems like some of the leadership in the Liberal Party there want to have retaliation, want to have retaliatory tariffs against Trump. I don't know if that's in their interest to do that, but so we'll find out this weekend, I guess.
Now about the tariffs on China, those are the economic tariffs that we discussed earlier. Those require a process. The process has been set in place by executive orders signed on day one. And so that looks like something that we're going to hear more about in say, March, April. One thing I'll note is that in China, they have a very different social model than the US. The government industry has stayed sponsored. The government's plan is to create lots of jobs, lots of manufacturing and ship those goods abroad. So they kind of can't come and build factories in the US like Japan did since that's basically giving Chinese jobs away to America.
So there's really, I don't see if there's any good, it's very difficult to have a good negotiated base outcome. So I think that tariffs will definitely have to be put on China simply because the Chinese can't offer the job that the Americans want. And you think China expects to retaliate like they did in 2018 and 2019 with tariffs on what America exports to China, which includes agricultural products. And I believe Trump had to give the farmers a subsidy because the farmers got hurt, right? Trump administration is unhappy that the Chinese did not honor the phase one deal. In the phase one deal, China was supposed to buy a lot of US agriculture products. Like you said, Jack, they didn't do it. I think they're, I think that makes the Trump people unhappy and it makes them less inclined to trust what the Chinese say right now.
So I am not an expert on Chinese politics. I've read articles saying that the Chinese are prepared to retaliate, prepared to weather the storm. So yeah, I guess they'll retaliate. Now the tariffs did, some of that money did go to repay farmers, but that's kind of how this whole strategy works, right? You put tariffs on, you click that money and you use it to buffer some of the losers of the trade war as we move towards reindustrialization. So that's probably going to happen again. So Joseph, so you're, are you bullish on bonds and bearish on stocks right now? Absolutely. Wow. So you're also very bullish on gold, right? Gold is part of that. It's again, making new highs today as we speak. I think it's part of that geopolitical risk trade right now. If you have a trade war, who, there's a lot of vulnerability here, right? If you're China and you're earning, let's say a trillion dollars a year, it's not entirely a billion dollars, but most of it probably is. You got to put those dollars somewhere. Are you going to just turn around and buy us different bonds, knowing that this country is not super friendly towards me, knowing that, looking at your friend Russia, well, you kind of lost all their farm reserves, right? What are you going to do? One of the, you're going to have to diversify and one of the obvious I've been used is gold. And if you're making a trillion dollars a year off trade, then you have a lot of money to buy gold. So I think that that's, that's looking pretty good as well. Interesting. What if terrorists reduce the Chinese surplus and they have less money to buy gold? That's possible as well. But if things get that bad, then you can have a calm position or change where you shift more of your dollars that you currently hold to gold. But in any case, I think it's, it's not just China, right? I think there are, there are many people who are, who will be on the other side of the trade war and they all have to diversify a bit as well.
The United States and China, that relationship is very important and highlighted in the press, but you also have trading relationships with, you know, the Middle East, India, South America, and so forth. So I think there's potential for, for a lot of, I guess, more of a fragmentation in the system. So you're bearish on stocks, you're bullish on bonds, you're bullish on gold. Are you bullish on short-term interest rates like the two-year or so for futures because you think the Fed will cut more than the market expects? I think so for futures is the best way right now to hedge. My personal view is the best way to hedge all this. As you know, you buy so for futures, you know, you don't believe that there's no cost of carry or anything like that. So if all this happens, the immediate reaction, of course, is for the Fed to cut rates, to stimulate to ease financial conditions like they did in 2019. Now, my own sense is that the market is too hawkish. And so I don't feel like there's a lot of risk that the Fed will, you know, turn to hiking rates and so forth. So I think that looks like it's really asymmetric to me. So I do like short-term, let's say, two year yield, two year treasuries, so for futures, near-date it's over futures and so forth. So yeah, that's something I like the most actually.
What happened to me, covered? What we could talk about, you know, I think something that's really interesting is that the stuff that we're doing of what Elon is doing with, you know, buying out federal government employees, how's that going to work, right? He thinks that we might be able to get 10, 5% of the people to take that buyout. I think that's a fascinating way to reduce the federal government. I think that it's interesting in the sense that it's structured so that you will resign like eight months from now but don't have to do anything anymore. So it doesn't seem like that will show up in unemployment statistics for some time, even if you suddenly lose, say, 200,000 people from the government. And in addition to that, there's an effort to try to reduce the amount of funding that the US government gives to all these NGOs, which is basically employment, which is basically employment center for a lot of political activists.
And so I think, so I don't know if they'll do that. I don't know if they'll find the way to do that. I suspect that they will. But if they do that, though, I think that's going to have a negative impact on employment because a lot of these guys, you know, if you're a professional activist, I'm not sure that you have a lot of marketable skills. Right. And so when you include non-governmental organizations, I know that the government is a lot bigger. But Joseph, just looking at the federal government, so not state and local government employees, the federal government, the US currently employs 3 million people, which is where it was in 1989. Actually, in 1989, it was 3.1 million.
So this idea, you know, I understand there's this narrative that we have scores and scores of people, you know, at a desk job drinking coffee, not really getting a lot of work done. You know, I'm not saying that the government is the most efficient thing, but I don't know. That's actually absolutely what happens at the government. Trust me. But Joseph, I mean, like in HR departments at many private companies, that happens as well. You know, there's, I think it's, I mean, I've never worked at the government, but, but I'm just just, I'm just looking at the statistic.
Like in the 1950s, there were 2.4 million people working in the federal government. And now there's 3 million. So where is this huge amount of waste? And if there is waste now, haven't we've been wasting it for literally close to 100 years? I mean, like the growth, the social justice, the growth in the huge government employment is in state and local governments. Yes. So I think, and I think that's fine because the same local governments aren't like the federal government. They can't put money. So in a sense, you would have, they have a lever to discipline them. If they spend too much money, you know, they'll run out.
They have to do cuts, which they sometimes do. And so I think that's fine. Again, it's their money. They can spend it. The difference is that the federal government doesn't have that same constraint. So it's more liable to, to have waste. So because there's not that mechanism there. I agree with you that, you know, maybe it's a couple hundred thousand people. It's not that much in the grand scheme of things, but you know, I think that it's possible that that could have some impact on employment numbers going forward. Not right away, of course, because it's structured to be a resignation in the future. But good.
But I think the probably the funding of these NGOs and stuff like that probably has more of a direct impact on unemployment. And in terms of cutting the deficit, cutting spending, how effective do you think it's going to be? Elon and Doge were throwing out numbers of one to two trillion. Do you think that is realistic with you cutting a hundred thousand employees? It's very, very difficult to cut the deficit. I mean, look at it. It just goes higher and higher. But what I like is that they're trying. They're doing something and that's the beginning of that could be the beginning of something more. Again, it's a start. I didn't really hear a lot of that in the last few years in the first Trump administration or nor the Biden administration, but now they they're doing something.
So that's a good direction. It's going to be hard, but they're making progress. And when I look, the huge, huge percentage of government spending is as well as interest on interest on the debt, then entitlements of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Trump administration said, not going to touch entitlements at all. So that's off the table. When I think of huge domestic government waste, I think of the military where there's stories of, you know, there's a there's a door hinge on an airplane and it costs $30 to make, but the government buys it from some contractor for $10,000. That's where I seek a lot of the waste.
Do you think Elon Musk, Doge, Higgs, Trump, do you think they are committed to cutting the waste in the military sector, which is famous for its intimate connection with private contractors? Number one, do you agree that that is where the real waste is? And number two, do you think Doge will be effective in getting rid of that waste? Or are the political connections just too strong? So federal subending is basically mandatory. So that's Social Security, Medicare, that's not can be touched. As you mentioned, there's interest rate that can't be touched either.
And there's discretionary and that includes military. That's the price that could be cut. And I think that is very difficult. And like you mentioned, Jack, that's, you know, there's, they have a lot of political power is difficult to do. They also famously seem to have trouble passing, passing audit, right? So I think one thing that Elon seems to be bringing there that we didn't have before is an understanding of technology. For example, Elon has been going on talking about how, you know, the future of warfare in air in the air is drones, right? Small and cheap. That's what everyone is using these days. Why are we spending these billions and billions of dollars? Basically a bottomless amount of money into these F 35s, which take forever to develop our very expensive and are basically obsolete in a world where we can produce drones cheaply and quickly, right? So these, these things, I think could, could let's say we don't have these programs anymore or at least slim them down. That could have a big impact.
So I think it's possible that he, Elon can make a difference. Doge can make a difference. Now the political side is always difficult to say. One of the things that we've seen over the past few decades is that the United States always ends up fighting a war somewhere in the world. We have Iraq as kind of a disaster, Afghanistan and so forth. And we have wars in Eastern Europe as well. That's really good for these defense companies and they have a lot of political power. Well, it seems like Trump doesn't like them and they don't like Trump and Trump did not start world wars his first term. So maybe that will continue. So I don't know about the power dynamics specifically, but it seems like at the moment that at least it seems like the power is with, you know, the more somewhat more isolationist Trump's Trump team.
And thank you, Joseph. How are you, what's your economic outlook? What's your view on the unemployment rate on consumer spending the risk of a recession? So I think we would have, we're going to have growth slow down notably, I think much more than people expect because these tariffs are really disruptive. Again, I think the biggest thing that's mispriced in the market is misunderstanding the president Trump agenda. And that is to have tariffs to reshape the global order and to collect revenue. And if you put tariffs on a lot of countries and a lot of things, that's going to impact real growth. That's going to impact business confidence and that's going to slow growth down. And it's also going to be bad for the financial markets. And as we know, a lot of the spending has been financed through the wealth effect. So I think we would have much lower growth this year than last year. And that is also a reason why I think that we're going to have much more cuts in the market is pricing in today.
Well, Joseph, you have been fading the recession narrative for over three years now. So when you say you're worried about growth and you are getting pretty bullish on on yield deals going down, I'm definitely paying attention. Joseph, thanks so much for coming on monetary matters. People can find you on Twitter at FedGuy12 and your work is at FedGuy.com, your book, Central Banking 101. It's a classic. People should check it out if they want to learn about Central Banking. Thank you so much, Joseph. Thanks everyone for watching. Thanks, Jack. Thanks for watching. Remember to check out Vanek.com slash NLR Jack to learn more about the Vanek Uranium and nuclear ETF. Thank you. Thank you. This closes the door.