Moneybeat: Deal dash 2025

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now to talk business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group. He is here now. Good morning to you, David.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning, Nick, Good to be with you.

EICHER: So … 200 trade deals already … the president told Time magazine in an exclusive interview suggesting everything will be in place within weeks. At the White House last week, President Trump said this:

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can’t think of one country that doesn’t want to negotiate a deal. And, they either negotiate a deal or we set a deal that we think is fair.

The reporter at Time who did the interview went on CNN to promote the interview and confessed he didn’t really understand what the president was saying … and I get that sometimes he’s difficult to read. But what is the reality of the dealmaking around tariffs and the trade war? Do you have any sense of the progress?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, some may assume I’m being critical or accusing the administration of duplicitousness, and that’s not at all the case. I do think a lot of the dealmaking is going to be cosmetic because for the very simple reason that there are a lot of countries we’re trying to get deals with that we do not now have bad deals with.

You know, this is the reason, for example, that a deal with Japan has not been announced. We’ve set this whole thing up around the idea that we need to “charge them what they charge us.” But the problem with Japan is we charge them more than they charge us. I don’t think the administration wants to come out and announce: “Hey, good news, we got Japan to raise their tariffs on us.”

The fact is that we really are dealing with China. Yet the administration brought all these other countries in and now they have to announce deals where a lot of the predicate was just not totally accurate.

Yet, I do think an India deal is coming. A lot of the deals, Nick, will not end up as, “Japan was charging us 10% percent and now they’re only going to charge us 5%.” More likely, it’ll be to open up more markets for us on certain agricultural products. Or India agreed not to have this trade barrier or other things outside tariff percentages. A lot of those deals will come.

Look, you can’t do 90 deals, with 90 countries, in 90 days if they’re real substantive deals. I know how much the president loves dealmaking, and it’s been the kind of essence of his career for decades. But these types of trade deals, if we mean by them the same thing we’ve historically meant—exhaustive, comprehensive, legal, sustainable, enforceable documents—most of those have taken years to negotiate.

So really what you’re going to get is not a deal. You’re going to get a framework. And that is probably going to be good enough for the president. It’s certainly going to serve as an off ramp. But, you know, you announce 20 deals in the next two or three weeks.

If one of them is not China, it doesn’t matter. The country that the world is looking to, that the U.S. economy is looking to, is China. You know, when we’re importing as much as we are, China is a big elephant in the room that has to be resolved for the sake of U.S. commercial interests.

EICHER: All right, that Time interview I referred to was for the occasion of the 100-day mark of the second Trump presidency. And I think probably too much is made of these milestones … but we are seeing lots of media stories about this one. The actual 100th day is Wednesday, so what’s on your report card so far?

BAHNSEN: Well, I know you’re not meaning to ask me about that politically. You mean kind of in the interest of the economy. It’s hard because, like a lot of people on the conservative right and as a man of faith, there’s a lot that I’m happy with, and there are things I’m not happy with.

That answer is so unsatisfying to people these days—because they want me to say all good things or all bad things.

But if I’m being totally objective, the first hundred days has been good for a lot of the non-economic factors—you know, things that a lot of people really are excited about, and I’m one of them, to get rid of all the DEI throughout government and those types of things.

So please I hope everyone hears me. I’m not taking away from anything administration’s done. But economically, I really do believe that the way this trade war was conducted, even if some of the objectives are understandable, I think it’s been very counterproductive. It’s put the economy in a very precarious position.

I do not believe we were headed into a recession. I think that with deregulation and energy independence and some of the better policies the president was going to administer, inflation was already coming down. Job growth was healthy. We were on a good economic footing and now we’re not. And the reason was pretty self-induced.

We could have really isolated China to begin with, made it more of a geopolitical issue than macroeconomic, and allowed us to go get that budget reconciliation bill done to pass some tax reform. That would’ve meaningfully, permanently, reliably extended to the tax cuts and allowed some of those economic benefits to sink in. Then let that be the foundation to other things he wanted to do in his agenda, like securing the border that I’m so complimentary of. Some, not all, of the DOGE things (Department of Government Efficiency) I’m complimentary of.

But, yeah, the trade war thing, you know, that’s been a big deal and it has hampered his agenda. That’s my honest opinion.

EICHER: Before we go, David, let me play some audio from the director of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk:

ELON MUSK: As people know there's been some blowback for the time that I’ve been spending in government with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Starting next month, I'll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla. My time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly.

What do you think about this: Is this an admission that government work is a little harder than it looks?

BAHNSEN: You know, it’s funny, I took it differently. I took it as him saying to the Tesla shareholders, this won’t be a permanent thing. From the vantage point of Tesla, not from the vantage point of DOGE or the government, but Tesla’s down like 50% since everything started here—and he’s saying, “I’m not going to be doing DOGE forever. I have some things to do. They’re very important. And if we don’t improve certain issues with government efficiency and debt and whatnot, we’re not going to have a country to sell cars in.”

He said all that stuff, but then he was really trying to say there’s a shelf life to what this DOGE deal will be. I assume that was always the case.

You may be right, by the way, that some of the reason he’ll accelerate a return to the private sector is because he doesn’t like what he’s having to do in the government sector. I know I wouldn’t like it.

But I think a lot of that was more just giving the foreshadowing to the Tesla shareholders that “I do intend to be back.”

EICHER: David Bahnsen, founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. David writes at WORLD Opinions and at dividendcafe.com. Thanks … we’ll see you next week!

BAHNSEN: Thanks, Nick, sounds good!

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