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Speaker 2: Prasad with this magisterial book, The Dooload of Cornell on Trade, Professor,
Speaker 2: what is a single thing you would say to a
Speaker 2: freshman class at Cornell this morning about this court decision?
Speaker 3: It is a very important accession of the Court's authority
Speaker 3: in terms of making sure that the separation of powers
Speaker 3: between the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch,
Speaker 3: you know, stays in place. There has been a lot
Speaker 3: of concent about the rule of law and what is
Speaker 3: being done to that. But it's very good that the
Speaker 3: Supreme Court really put its foot down and made it
Speaker 3: clear that at least the state authority that President Trump
Speaker 3: has been using to invoke tariffs against the broad range
Speaker 3: of trading partners, that's not quite on.
Speaker 2: You do this, You get on planes and you go
Speaker 2: advise the French, the Germans, you advise Singapore. What is
Speaker 2: your advice to the continent of Europe, is they respond
Speaker 2: to this trade bombshell patience.
Speaker 3: I think the key issue right now is how this
Speaker 3: is going to play out. The Trump administration has made
Speaker 3: it abundantly clear that it's going to use other tools
Speaker 3: that it has in its arsenal in order to reimpose
Speaker 3: tariffs at one level or the other. But the question
Speaker 3: of how effectively they can do it, how broadly they
Speaker 3: can do it, and how quickly they can do it,
Speaker 3: I think it's really on the table right now. Many countries,
Speaker 3: including economic areas the European Union, have in fact been
Speaker 3: engaged in negotiations, have set up trade deals for the
Speaker 3: US already, and some of them have gotten better deals
Speaker 3: because of this core tooling. Some of them have gotten
Speaker 3: worse deals. But I think the reality is that nobody
Speaker 3: quite knows right now what the trade landscape is going
Speaker 3: to look like, what sort of tariff measures are going
Speaker 3: to be in place. So I think right now waiting
Speaker 3: is probably the best thing to see how it does settles.
Speaker 4: So as far as this, if I'm a you know,
Speaker 4: some of the countries trading partners in the US, I mean,
Speaker 4: if I've already struck deals, what do I do here
Speaker 4: do I come back to the US and say, hey,
Speaker 4: we need to renegotiate.
Speaker 5: I'm not paying thirty percent here, I want the ten
Speaker 5: or to fifteen percent.
Speaker 6: What happens here, That's right.
Speaker 3: Many of these countries have made economic concessions and it
Speaker 3: has caused them some political capital within their own countries.
Speaker 3: So I think countries do want to stick with the
Speaker 3: trade deals if this core ruling leaves them in a
Speaker 3: better position. But there are many countries who struck trade deals,
Speaker 3: made these concessions, and now find themselves in a worse
Speaker 3: position because Trump has imposed these tariffs across the board
Speaker 3: using Section one two two, and that is certainly going
Speaker 3: to mean that renegotiation is needed. But the reality is
Speaker 3: that the US administration has limited capacity to deal with
Speaker 3: all of this at the same time. But certainly if
Speaker 3: a country has struck a trade deal and now is
Speaker 3: in a worse position, then before the deal they need
Speaker 3: to make a pitch for renegotiation or at least for
Speaker 3: the Trump administration, you know, to adhere to the terms
Speaker 3: of the deal and give them exemptions from this broad
Speaker 3: fifteen percent tariff that Trump has now applied across the
Speaker 3: board for countries set there in the midst of negotiations.
Speaker 3: Certainly it gives them a stronger bargaining hand because the
Speaker 3: Trump administration clearly cannot apply tariff's villy nilly across the board.
Speaker 3: So I think those those negotiations are probably going to
Speaker 3: take a bit of a pause.
Speaker 7: S far.
Speaker 5: One could argue that, if nothing else, this Supreme Court
Speaker 5: ruling just reintroduces, I guess, a level of uncertainty into
Speaker 5: trade global trade like we had back almost in April
Speaker 5: of last year. How do you think global trading partners
Speaker 5: will proceed over the coming months given the Supreme Court ruling.
Speaker 3: The level of uncertainty, as you've pointed out, Paul, is
Speaker 3: just enormously elevated right now, because, yes, Trump's actions with
Speaker 3: tariffs are quite you know, peremptory mercurial, and you never
Speaker 3: quite knew what was going to happen in terms of
Speaker 3: the levels of tariffs, who would be subjected to them.
Speaker 3: But there was a sense that at least some certainty
Speaker 3: was returning to the process with some tariffs being taken off,
Speaker 3: some trade deals being struck. All of that is off
Speaker 3: the table right now. The more interesting question is how
Speaker 3: businesses are going to respond because to them now the
Speaker 3: landscape hascome completely uncertain, and the presumption is probably that
Speaker 3: they're going to retreat from trade and try to protect
Speaker 3: themselves from further on seventday.
Speaker 2: At the moment, that's right, I want to go as
Speaker 2: we're to finish up here, and folks, I can't say enough.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna say it.
Speaker 2: With Zwaran the Doom Loop, I'm like he's got Circe
Speaker 2: from the Game of Thrones in chapter one. I mean,
Speaker 2: I had no idea as far as Circe from the
Speaker 2: Game of Thrones was doing economics. She was. She was
Speaker 2: at Cornell. She was so so difficult at Cornell. She
Speaker 2: melted snowduts, just like in show. I look at the
Speaker 2: Doom Loop here and for me it's Apple lawyer up.
Speaker 2: They had eight hundred million and one point one billion,
Speaker 2: maybe one point four billion, some model of three point.
Speaker 6: Two billion in tariffs.
Speaker 2: His tim Cook can assue the United States of America
Speaker 2: to get that money back.
Speaker 3: That's going to be a long and very complicated role
Speaker 3: because certainly I'm traveling all the refunds, all the tariffs
Speaker 3: that have already been paid, and sending out refunds is
Speaker 3: going to be a massively difficult administrative process, although some
Speaker 3: argue that, you know, it's quite easy to just turn
Speaker 3: the money back, given that the US administration has a
Speaker 3: very clear indication of who paid tariffs and when. But
Speaker 3: I think there is going to be again some holding
Speaker 3: off on this because the numbers involved are really large
Speaker 3: at the moment, and it's sort of entirely clear this
Speaker 3: administration is that capacity to turn things around or wants to,
Speaker 3: because again with new tariffs coming into place, and some
Speaker 3: of these decisions now likely to rest on what tools
Speaker 3: the administration decides to use. I think all the uncertainty
Speaker 3: with the tariff landscape means that corporations are not going
Speaker 3: to be jumping up and down to get the tariffs back,
Speaker 3: especially the large ones. For the smaller ones that live
Speaker 3: day to day, it's a much more important issue because
Speaker 3: they need that money.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't disagree with that anyway. Shape for an asurpisade.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for joining us, Stay with us.
Speaker 2: More from Bloomberg Surveillance coming up after this.
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Speaker 2: Short a visit right now with Torston Slock with Apollo
Speaker 2: Global Management. He has spent the weekend and has wonderful
Speaker 2: continental europe experience. Torston, how do you think the continent
Speaker 2: will respond to tear us? The zeitgeist over the weekend
Speaker 2: is Britain hammered, China, Brazil, etc.
Speaker 6: I mean, how does the EU adjust?
Speaker 8: Well, the European Commission put out a statement yesterday where
Speaker 8: they clearly said that they were going to honor the
Speaker 8: train deal, but at the same time way were of
Speaker 8: course asking questions about well, what are the exact conditions
Speaker 8: for what we're doing going forward. So the Europeans have
Speaker 8: already stated that they are going to honor the trade deal.
Speaker 8: They expect the US to honor the trade deal. But
Speaker 8: it's very clear that this is indeed injecting a whole
Speaker 8: new level of uncertainty. Also on the Europeans Pod.
Speaker 6: With your work at Apollo Global Management.
Speaker 2: Is there a sum market reaction to what this does
Speaker 2: to confidence?
Speaker 6: Say out of the fourth of July.
Speaker 8: Well, the channels now is of course that Section one
Speaker 8: two two tariffs, the fifteen percent. They only count for
Speaker 8: one hundred and fifty days, and then it remains to
Speaker 8: be seen whether they will be continued by Congress. So
Speaker 8: in that sense, that's a whole new level of uncertainty.
Speaker 8: The other level of uncertainty also is that the fifteen
Speaker 8: percent is on the whole world and not on individual countries.
Speaker 8: So this is also raising questions about that it's no
Speaker 8: longer as targeted as it was before.
Speaker 9: It cannot even be targeted just to Europe or to.
Speaker 8: Say Korea or Japan. It is on literally every trade
Speaker 8: partner that the US has. So those two dimensions, both
Speaker 8: of the time length and also that on everyone, is
Speaker 8: indeed injecting uncertainty. I mean, well, of course many people
Speaker 8: might even have looked at this and say, well, Friday
Speaker 8: it was ten percent, now it's fifteen percent, And that's
Speaker 8: of course we're raising questions on their thoughts also about
Speaker 8: what is exactly the level of terrorists in particularly when
Speaker 8: we get two hundred and fifty days down the road.
Speaker 2: In Claudia Sampaul was blistering and saying that even these
Speaker 2: new tariffs could be legally.
Speaker 5: Challenged exactly so in TOURSA, what are our how do
Speaker 5: you think our trading partners will react here. It's just
Speaker 5: yet another kind of unknown thrown into the discussions of
Speaker 5: trade policy. How do you think they're going to react here?
Speaker 8: Well, I think that again the Europeans response, and I
Speaker 8: think also the fact that the Indian mission to the
Speaker 8: US to trade to do trade negotiations was canceled is
Speaker 8: telling you also that they are beginning to be at
Speaker 8: least some legal issues around both of course the existing
Speaker 8: trade deals, but also what might be the framework going forward.
Speaker 8: They are likely thinking about, well, if we signed a
Speaker 8: document today, is this going to change soon?
Speaker 6: Again?
Speaker 8: Are they going to be any legal issues? Ascodia Sam
Speaker 8: was saying that there one two two is actually under
Speaker 8: the conditions that there has to be a balance of
Speaker 8: payment crisis, which is very different from a trade crisis
Speaker 8: or a trade.
Speaker 6: Deficit and a balance of payment deficit.
Speaker 8: So from that perspective, there's also legal challenges likely going
Speaker 8: to come on this section one two two the tariffs.
Speaker 8: So that's why there's just a lot of things. The
Speaker 8: dust has really been whirled up. We really opened up
Speaker 8: the macroeconomic text boogainst national finance, because there's just a
Speaker 8: lot of things that now people need to think very
Speaker 8: hard about it, and I think that's what the rest
Speaker 8: of the world is trying to do at this moment.
Speaker 6: Torsen.
Speaker 5: Despite all the global trade uncertainty over the past fourteen
Speaker 5: fifteen months, the US economy performing well. How do you
Speaker 5: put that into context?
Speaker 8: Well, because in the background, while we've had the trade
Speaker 8: ball especially of course this diberation day, we've had a
Speaker 8: very strong boom in AI spending, and we've also had
Speaker 8: an industrial renaissance. The dustrial renaissance really was already started
Speaker 8: on the Biden with the Chips Act saying that semi
Speaker 8: conductors need to reproduce domestically. Of course, Trump has also
Speaker 8: focused on pharmaceuticals, need to produce domestically. That's also non
Speaker 8: focused on defense. Of course, need to also grow and
Speaker 8: this is us for a renaissance. This is indeed also
Speaker 8: something that's a tail into growth. And finally, let's not
Speaker 8: forget on January the first, we also got the one
Speaker 8: big beautiful bill, The one big bulti of Al bill
Speaker 8: was changes to tax laws that were done retroactively, so
Speaker 8: it actually took effect of first of January twenty twenty five.
Speaker 8: That means that when households get a tax refund here
Speaker 8: in April and March. Well, that tax refund, which normally
Speaker 8: is around three thousand dollars, that will not go up
Speaker 8: too roughly around four thousand dollars. So we have a
Speaker 8: fairly significant boost coming to consumer spending here in March, April,
Speaker 8: and May. And on top of that, we also have
Speaker 8: immediate expensing where companies can write down their capex expenditures
Speaker 8: right away, which is also a boost to capic spending.
Speaker 6: So the short answer to your question is, yes, the.
Speaker 8: Trade bill has certainly been a hit wind, but while
Speaker 8: that heatment has been playing out, we've had a number
Speaker 8: of tailwinds that, of course have been the reason why
Speaker 8: the economy has continued to do so well.
Speaker 6: Have you got a rationalization, tourist cinem a one point
Speaker 6: four percent GDP was due to shutdown. Did you bring
Speaker 6: down a real, real GDP view forward for the rest
Speaker 6: of this year.
Speaker 8: No, because also exactly as you're saying, Tom, this PA
Speaker 8: clearly said that the one point four number, if we
Speaker 8: take what the shutdown accounted for, there was roughly one
Speaker 8: percent is point, So that brings you to two point
Speaker 8: four which is higher than the Congressional Budget Office estimate
Speaker 8: of two percent, which is the long run growth rate
Speaker 8: for the US. So in that sense, the US economy
Speaker 8: outside of the shutdown, of course, was actually still doing
Speaker 8: reasonly well, and they slowly out of the label market.
Speaker 8: As you also have discussed so much, it really is
Speaker 8: mainly drawn by labor supply that has been falling and
Speaker 8: much so much labor demand. So that's why you can
Speaker 8: still have strong GDP and slower job growth. But slow
Speaker 8: job growth is not because of weaker labor demand, but
Speaker 8: it's really because the weaker labor supply. So taken together,
Speaker 8: the US economy actually continued to do well. That doesn't
Speaker 8: mean that there are still risks that we could hit
Speaker 8: the rough and not go down straight the fairway. We
Speaker 8: actually think the risk of hitting the rough and not
Speaker 8: going straight to the whole here it has increased from
Speaker 8: ten percent to thirty percent. So we are watching the
Speaker 8: tail ridge to the opto very carefully, not only of
Speaker 8: course because of AI and what's going on with the
Speaker 8: trade ball, but also because of issues. Just as comment debt,
Speaker 8: interest rates could potentially see a quick move up and
Speaker 8: down because of the inflation surprise at imposting and all
Speaker 8: SAX saying inflation is going to go high. So that's
Speaker 8: a number of other things that could throw us off.
Speaker 8: But the bottom line is the economy continues to do well.
Speaker 2: Or is there can post and looking at wage inflation,
Speaker 2: that maybe the surprise of the year. Turst and Sluck,
Speaker 2: thank you so much with a puddle.
Speaker 6: Stay with us.
Speaker 2: More from Bloomberg Surveillance coming up after this.
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Speaker 7: It's one of.
Speaker 2: The most twisted parchments and economics out of Brown Universe,
Speaker 2: with all of the fabulous heritage there of William Poole
Speaker 2: and other giants as well. They're not to the crazy
Speaker 2: Mathewess Paul of San Diego, which is like the most mathematical.
Speaker 2: I mean, they're doing standard deviations in the hallways and
Speaker 2: it's nuts. Martha Gimblet survived at all. It has provided
Speaker 2: a leadership at the budget lab at Yale, and as
Speaker 2: we go from stumbling crisis to stumbling crisis, everybody is
Speaker 2: tuning in with more and more intensity to the academic work.
Speaker 2: This weekend they published a tour de force. I put
Speaker 2: one chart, figure five out. I'm going to translate it
Speaker 2: now with political viciousness for Martha Gimble.
Speaker 6: Martha, your distribution.
Speaker 2: Of tariff effect and then adjusted for the fact will substitute.
Speaker 2: And you take it after tex when you take the
Speaker 2: tariff analysis of the budget, lab after tax, after some
Speaker 2: form of rental housing measurement, after some form of basic
Speaker 2: food measurement, how is the bottom half going to survive
Speaker 2: these tariffs?
Speaker 9: You know, it's not going to be great for anyone,
Speaker 9: but tariffs are also regressive. It's much much worse for
Speaker 9: people at the bottom. And I think it's also important
Speaker 9: to keep in mind that this combines with the One
Speaker 9: Big Beautiful Bill Act from last year, which yes, you
Speaker 9: know does send money out into the economy, but is
Speaker 9: also regressive. And if you combine the effects of teriffs
Speaker 9: and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, it's only really
Speaker 9: people at the top who are better off on net.
Speaker 9: And so if you're thinking about what's going to happen
Speaker 9: with consumer spending in the future, we're going to be
Speaker 9: facing consumers towards the middle and bottom who are a
Speaker 9: lot more constrained because prices are going up for them
Speaker 9: at the same time that they have less spending power.
Speaker 5: So, Martha, what did the Supreme Court ruling mean for
Speaker 5: the overall tariff rate? Is it HighRes it lowers the same?
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 9: Well, yes, that is an excellent question. That's partly because
Speaker 9: the tariff rate has been a lot of different things
Speaker 9: over the weekend. So we started at sixteen percent going
Speaker 9: into this Scotus ruling. Then scot Has ruled, it went
Speaker 9: down to nine. Then President Trump announced tariffs, but they
Speaker 9: didn't announce the exemption, so it looked like it went
Speaker 9: up to fifteen percent, and then they announced the exemptions,
Speaker 9: went down to twelve, and then he announced that we
Speaker 9: were going to fifteen and went back up to fourteen percent.
Speaker 9: So we've had like five different tariff rates in the
Speaker 9: space of thirty six hours. I should also note when
Speaker 9: I say, you know, twelve fourteen, he's using an authority
Speaker 9: that expires in one hundred and fifty days. Now they've
Speaker 9: said that they're going to put other tariffs in place
Speaker 9: that will, you know, in some way was replicate these
Speaker 9: tariffs That might be true at the overall effective tariff rate,
Speaker 9: that headline number. But if you're a business, you need
Speaker 9: to know, wait, exactly what products are going to be tariffed,
Speaker 9: exactly what countries are going to be affected, And they
Speaker 9: haven't provided clarity on that, and so what we're in
Speaker 9: is this big sea of uncertainty that we're all going
Speaker 9: to be sitting in for quite some time.
Speaker 5: So, boy, it's so hard for just to keep track
Speaker 5: of what the tariff rates are. Do we have any
Speaker 5: confidence that they're being collected accurately? Because I can't imagine
Speaker 5: some person, it's some loading doc, you know, figuring all
Speaker 5: this stuff out here.
Speaker 9: I will say, at one point in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 9: a reporter called me and said, do you know what
Speaker 9: the tariff rate is on this very specific product? And
Speaker 9: I said, I have no idea. That's a question for
Speaker 9: CBP And he said they were my first call. They
Speaker 9: said they couldn't tell me. It's very confusing, and you're
Speaker 9: trying to keep track of all these different things and
Speaker 9: when things land when they landed. This is it's really
Speaker 9: hard to do business under these circumstances.
Speaker 6: Give us a window, Martha, into this.
Speaker 2: How many experts at the Budget Lab of Yale were
Speaker 2: working on this magic Friday and into the weekend. How
Speaker 2: many people were making the soup?
Speaker 9: Yeah, we had four. So I will call in here
Speaker 9: John Rico, John Isln, Josh Kendall, and Mattie Lee. So
Speaker 9: everyone please take your local So.
Speaker 2: Like Uslin's got substantial like Berkeley, Maryland chops, he's worked
Speaker 2: at CBO. And that did the adults in the room,
Speaker 2: these young turks who are brilliant, do they see the
Speaker 2: same legal sequence ballet again of a court, an appeals court,
Speaker 2: a Supreme court, or for all our listeners and viewers,
Speaker 2: Martha Gimble, can we get this done faster?
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 9: I mean, so the section one twenty two, which is
Speaker 9: the already that they're using right now, you've already seen
Speaker 9: people over the weekend debating whether or not it applies
Speaker 9: to this particular situation. And you know, once again, are
Speaker 9: these tariffs legal? So I assume that there's going to
Speaker 9: be litigation and we're just going to go through the
Speaker 9: whole thing all over again.
Speaker 2: Martha Gimblale with us a budget levity, and we continue here.
Speaker 2: Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College definitive his book Against the
Speaker 2: Tides Change the landscape of tariff analysis thirty forty years
Speaker 2: ago with US tomorrow as well.
Speaker 6: Paul Sweeney with Martha Kimball.
Speaker 5: Martha, you know, how about some of these training quote
Speaker 5: unquote partners that have signed I guess, big reciprocal deals
Speaker 5: that are at rates perhaps higher than the ten or
Speaker 5: fifteen percent wherever we are. Now, what do they do?
Speaker 5: Did they come back to the negotiating table and say, hey,
Speaker 5: we want the better rate? What do they do?
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's a really great question. There was just reporting
Speaker 9: out this morning saying that Europe is putting their you know,
Speaker 9: deals on hold until they find out what on earth
Speaker 9: is going on. There's a lot of uncertainty at this point.
Speaker 9: You haven't asked me about refunds for people who have
Speaker 9: already paid merits as another source of uncertainty. You know,
Speaker 9: the court didn't really rule on that. The administration has
Speaker 9: heavily implied that they're going to fight any payment of refunds,
Speaker 9: So people are going to start sumer ring.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 9: It's it's when you think about tariffs. There are negative
Speaker 9: economic effects that I think about with tariffs, But for me, overall,
Speaker 9: the biggest negative comes in through the uncertainty and people
Speaker 9: being unable to make decisions and not knowing what's going on,
Speaker 9: and we certainly did not see a decrease in uncertainty
Speaker 9: over My.
Speaker 2: Answer is, as an amateur, this gets decided at the
Speaker 2: ballot box, as it has back to eighteen ninety and
Speaker 2: frankly before that that was coming off the Panic of
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy two. They had the enjoyment of the Panic
Speaker 2: of eighteen ninety three three years later or basically then
Speaker 2: through the Republicans out of office. Martha Gimble, do you
Speaker 2: and your team see a political ballot back solution to
Speaker 2: our tariff discussion?
Speaker 9: You know, we're a nonpartisan group of economists, so I
Speaker 9: want to mention in trouble. Come on, I will leave
Speaker 9: that to the political scientist. The one thing I will
Speaker 9: say is, you know, because of the one hundred and
Speaker 9: fifty day limit on the type of legal authority that
Speaker 9: they're using right now, this is actually going to become
Speaker 9: almost by design, a very live issue over the summer,
Speaker 9: just as we're heading into the midterms. So I think
Speaker 9: you know, depending on which way you think this is
Speaker 9: going to go, it's going to be established a discussion.
Speaker 2: Then can you calculate the fiscal whole. Now, can you
Speaker 2: figure out with the just the craziness of what Paul
Speaker 2: seventy two hours, is there a new plug in that
Speaker 2: CBO is going to have where the money's not there?
Speaker 6: What do we do?
Speaker 9: Well? First of all, shout out to CBO who managed
Speaker 9: to get their updated budget and economic outlook out right
Speaker 9: before this, so I know the animals. They're beating a
Speaker 9: size side of relief, you know.
Speaker 6: There.
Speaker 9: They did say that they expect that the administration will
Speaker 9: be able to, under different legal authorities, basically recreate the
Speaker 9: tariffs and it won't have a huge impact on revenue.
Speaker 9: We're still waiting to see again what a final mix
Speaker 9: of tariffs looks like. If you look at the fifteen
Speaker 9: percent and it's extended after one hundred and fifty days,
Speaker 9: you know that takes you down to two trillion over ten.
Speaker 9: We were previously at two point three trillion over ten,
Speaker 9: So you've lost three hundred billion. You know, that's a
Speaker 9: substantial amount of money, to be clear, but you haven't
Speaker 9: lost the full shebang. You're still going to get substantial
Speaker 9: amount of revenue.
Speaker 2: If Apple wants a big check, or name any other
Speaker 2: big company, are the tariff monies in a piggy bank
Speaker 2: somewhere or have they already Dare I say, have they
Speaker 2: already been spent?
Speaker 9: Well, it's sort of an interesting question actually of like,
Speaker 9: you know, how good has the record keeping been on this?
Speaker 9: You know, it's not like they've been kept in a
Speaker 9: you know, special box in case of you know, how
Speaker 9: the Supreme Court ruled. Now you know, that doesn't mean
Speaker 9: that they can't give refunds, but they have to track
Speaker 9: down who paid what in what way. You need the documentation.
Speaker 9: It's just going to be a mess.
Speaker 5: So what is the the bold case for just broad
Speaker 5: tearffs like we're seeing this administration. You're an economist, what
Speaker 5: there's got to be something there for this administration to
Speaker 5: hang their hat on.
Speaker 9: You know, almost all economists would say to you that
Speaker 9: there is not. You know, we've started doing a tariff
Speaker 9: impacts tracker where every month we look at the impacts
Speaker 9: of tariffs and you know, are we seeing that improvement
Speaker 9: in manufacturing employment that the administration said we would get
Speaker 9: from tariffs? No, has not been the case, right, things
Speaker 9: like that, we are seeing some sign of tariffs showing
Speaker 9: up in durable prices. So, you know, so far what
Speaker 9: you're seeing is the beginnings of what economist said was
Speaker 9: going to happen, which is on net bad for employment,
Speaker 9: not ideal for GDP, and a rise in prices.
Speaker 6: Paul is the most uncomfortable questions, Martha. It's made more
Speaker 6: so by the exactly Martha, you're a trooper. Thank you
Speaker 6: so much. Folks may think Tank of the Year last year,
Speaker 6: the budget lab at Yelle.
Speaker 2: There's a million other people doing spectacular at work, but wow,
Speaker 2: had they become influential?
Speaker 6: Stay with us.
Speaker 2: More from Bloomberg Surveillance coming up after this.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast. Catch us live
Speaker 1: weekday afternoons from seven to ten am.
Speaker 6: I mean, in silence, you don't really know right now.
Speaker 5: I know in New Jersey Translit will wait on them,
Speaker 5: but I suspect I'll be spending another evening in the metropolis.
Speaker 2: We will get an update now from a gentleman with experiences,
Speaker 2: this legit major storm experience. General liber joins us now
Speaker 2: with the mt A Jenna. What's your biggest headache right now?
Speaker 7: Listen?
Speaker 10: We got service running. You know, the challenges are are
Speaker 10: well known. We got to keep our snow fighting equipment.
Speaker 10: We got jet engine snowblowers operating on the subways, uh,
Speaker 10: literally clearing the tracks, especially in the outdoor areas. The
Speaker 10: challenge of you know, buses moving around is the same
Speaker 10: as any vehicle.
Speaker 7: But we are meeting the challenge, Tom Paul. We are.
Speaker 10: We're running full subway service, albeit on a little you know,
Speaker 10: reduced frequencies.
Speaker 7: We got buses out there.
Speaker 10: Metro North is operating on a reduced The one piece
Speaker 10: of our system that is on suspension is the Long
Speaker 10: Island Railroad. It's no secret that Long Island's getting hammered
Speaker 10: and that wasn't the safe place to operate. But otherwise subways, buses,
Speaker 10: commuter rail operating.
Speaker 2: How does the wind play into it? I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: calling it a snow it cane. I get the temperature
Speaker 2: snow is snow, But like the wind on the various
Speaker 2: trunks that you have, I mean underground, it doesn't affect it.
Speaker 2: But how do you adapt to the wind?
Speaker 10: Generally, Burt, the issue with wind mostly is actually the
Speaker 10: impact it has undrifting it. You know, when you have,
Speaker 10: for example, we have some areas of the subway system
Speaker 10: that are what we call an open cut. That's like
Speaker 10: a little valley, a depressed area below grade, but it's
Speaker 10: still open to the sky and snow tends to accumulate,
Speaker 10: and the wind pushes the snow into those areas. The
Speaker 10: drifting on the commuter railroads sometimes we'll cover the third
Speaker 10: rail are source of power. So that is and obviously
Speaker 10: for people who are driving buses and even trains, the
Speaker 10: visibility issues associated with wind. That wind is the dominant
Speaker 10: factor in determining when we can bring back Long Island
Speaker 10: Railroad service at the east end of our system.
Speaker 5: So what is the latest thinking, johneral about the Long
Speaker 5: Island Railroad here, because again, as you've mentioned, and we've
Speaker 5: heard from the weather folks, that's really bearing the brunt
Speaker 5: of the storm.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Well, we did an orderly shutdown last night at about
Speaker 10: one am. The goal is always to get everybody home.
Speaker 10: We did that last night with some extra service late
Speaker 10: late and now we're going to be focused on orderly
Speaker 10: resumption of service, hopefully in time to operate tomorrow when
Speaker 10: the world will will be getting a little bit back
Speaker 10: to normal. So that's the approach that we take safety first,
Speaker 10: you know, and take account of where the snow accumulations
Speaker 10: and the drifting may have impacted on service. You know,
Speaker 10: one thing to bear in mind is in our big
Speaker 10: train yards, that's where we tend to get, you know,
Speaker 10: the biggest drifting issues.
Speaker 7: And you know sometimes that.
Speaker 10: Inhibits your ability to put cars into the system into service.
Speaker 10: So we'll be digging out from in the yards and
Speaker 10: making sure that again the third rail and the tracks
Speaker 10: themselves are clear of snow.
Speaker 2: We continue with General liber MTA share quality time from
Speaker 2: his crisis center, Paul Sweeney with General liber Jenna.
Speaker 5: So, all your personnel, the critical personnel of the MTA,
Speaker 5: how do you manage getting those folks to where they
Speaker 5: need to be, because, boy, they have to get there
Speaker 5: just like the rest of us.
Speaker 7: It's part of the.
Speaker 10: Deal when you sign up to work for the MTA
Speaker 10: that you may have to come in under extreme circumstances.
Speaker 10: When the rest of the world is being told to
Speaker 10: stay home, our workers are being told to come in
Speaker 10: and they do. They work through the night, they work heavily.
Speaker 10: Yesterday we got seventy thousand employees at the MTA. Thousands
Speaker 10: of them have been many of them have slept in
Speaker 10: you know, in bus garages or in rail the rail
Speaker 10: Control center where our head of Subways spent the night
Speaker 10: at the bus command center.
Speaker 7: It's part of the deal working for the NTA.
Speaker 10: And you know, I talked to Governor Hokel in the
Speaker 10: last you know, in the last hour or two and
Speaker 10: uh and and she's really focused on on you know,
Speaker 10: a tip of the hat to the to the workforce.
Speaker 6: A general lever.
Speaker 2: I love artificial intelligence. It can ruin your day. General,
Speaker 2: you gotta help me here with the one point eight
Speaker 2: million dollars per inch? Myth Now, this is a Department
Speaker 2: of sanitation. Did every inch of snow costs one million dollars?
Speaker 2: What's your every inch of blizzard that costs the MTA?
Speaker 6: Do you have a number? Even if you don't tell me,
Speaker 6: do you have a number in your head?
Speaker 10: I'll tell you the absolute truth. I have no idea whatsoever.
Speaker 7: It's that you've given me a new metric.
Speaker 10: We we use analytics here like crazy to evaluate how
Speaker 10: well we're doing, hopefully to operate more efficiently every day.
Speaker 10: You know, revue you know, costs per car mile, costs
Speaker 10: per revenue mile for it subway and bus and commuter rail.
Speaker 10: You've given me a new metric to study. But right
Speaker 10: now I have no idea what to say to you.
Speaker 6: John Old.
Speaker 5: This is the second big, big winter storm of the season.
Speaker 5: It's arguably one of the biggest storms we've had in
Speaker 5: decades in this area. How's your system kind of holding up?
Speaker 5: Does is there a cumulative effect where boy, we can't
Speaker 5: We really don't want to have a third or fourth
Speaker 5: storm this season.
Speaker 10: Honestly, the challenge is, uh is you know the same
Speaker 10: every time, which is you have to get the snow off.
Speaker 10: You have to make sure you have enough people to
Speaker 10: operate fully. You have to chain all the buses, you
Speaker 10: have to move car you know, subway cars around and
Speaker 10: put them in the tunnel, store them in the tunnels.
Speaker 7: Uh, you know it's not.
Speaker 10: That we we we every storm makes it harder. To
Speaker 10: the contrary, you know, for better, whereas we're getting better
Speaker 10: at preparing for these because we've had repetitive storms and
Speaker 10: we're going to continue to try to get better. In
Speaker 10: the air of climate change, we're dealing with all kinds
Speaker 10: of extreme weather events. You know, right now we're forgetting
Speaker 10: about torrential rainfall and and and rising sea levels, but
Speaker 10: those are issues for the MTA as well.
Speaker 2: What does the morning look like. Let's say four or
Speaker 2: five am Tuesday morning. Mister Lieber, can you say back
Speaker 2: to normal.
Speaker 10: I don't know about normal, but listen, our friends in
Speaker 10: at the Department of Sanitation are clearing not just the
Speaker 10: streets but the bus stops. That's really important, something that
Speaker 10: I know the Mayor wants to do better at compared
Speaker 10: to the first time around, so that our bus people
Speaker 10: who depend on buses will be able to get on
Speaker 10: and off them without having.
Speaker 7: To climb climb over a four foot mint of snow.
Speaker 7: Who shots intant issue.
Speaker 6: That's brilliant.
Speaker 2: Who actually picks up a shovel and shovels a bus stop?
Speaker 2: Who is that person?
Speaker 10: Well, it's a lot of it's it's folks who work
Speaker 10: for the Department of Sanitation.
Speaker 7: There's some implemented.
Speaker 10: This is City of New York as opposed to MTR
Speaker 10: but they're supplemented by Parks Department workers and they're actually
Speaker 10: hiring folks off the street for extra shovelers this time around.
Speaker 10: So I'm very hopeful that that particular challenge will be
Speaker 10: addressed and we're we're going to be clearing not just
Speaker 10: the tracks but also our yards as I mentioned, which
Speaker 10: is where trains tend to get stuck.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 10: And and there are you know, a lot of complex
Speaker 10: switches that can inhibit things that they're not properly in
Speaker 10: order one.
Speaker 6: More question, Paul, you were you were impressed by the buses.
Speaker 5: Yeah, just walking to work this morning, I saw some
Speaker 5: of the buses here. Talk to us about the buses
Speaker 5: because boy, there, I haven't seen too many snowplows out yet.
Speaker 5: Because the storm is still raging here. How do the
Speaker 5: buses adapt here?
Speaker 7: It's it's old fashioned stuff, Paul.
Speaker 10: It's we put chains on every on the tires of
Speaker 10: every bus, and that that that gets done in the days.
Speaker 7: Leading up to, uh to the storm.
Speaker 10: When we know it's coming, you know, forecastings get better
Speaker 10: and better, we chain the entire fleet, and we take
Speaker 10: all the articulated buses, which are you know, tend to
Speaker 10: move around a little more in slippery conditions. We take
Speaker 10: them out of service, and we make plans accordingly.
Speaker 2: Gennal, thank you so much for taking precious time this morning.
Speaker 6: This is the MTA of New York City.
Speaker 2: As they deal with the storm, as I'm sure that
Speaker 2: we're seeing in Philadelphia and Boston.
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