Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchal and with me, Azanam Munchang and Jack Smith.

Today is our last podcast before the summer break, and we would like to devote it to talk about

trade. It's going to be a little shorter than our podcast, our long-form podcast with which

we have been experimenting in the last few weeks. This is a, we are returning to

our original version where we hold a discussion for about 30 to 40 minutes, free form, without

sort of any prepared questions. Just the kind of discussion, you're listening in, the kind of

discussion that we have amongst ourselves when we discuss these issues, so it has a certain

roughness quality to it.

And what we want to talk about today is, you know, we are now in the week after Donald Trump sent

this letter. We have not yet got a trade agreement between the EU and the US. There may not be

a trade agreement at all. We don't know. There are now trade talks going on between the

US and the EU, the European Trade Commissioner Maro Sefkovic, is traveling again to Washington

with his team to see whether there can be a deal. Last time, that wasn't the case. But last time they didn't,

before Trump sent his letter, there was sort of an outline of a deal. And the EU discussed it.

And then Trump's letter came. They were completely taken aback because the negotiation hadn't

sort of broken down in any formal sense. It's just they kind of stole. They had asked the

US for more clarifications

and then came the letter instead. So they're a little bit puzzled by this, apart from the fact

that they're angry. They're puzzled by why that happened and what happened. So they have two

weeks to see whether there can be any material changes. Just sort of as a summary for where we were, the deal as it was outlined

before the breakdown or before the letter that Trump sent, foresaw a 10% tariff on most goods,

a 25% tariff on cars with possibly some mitigation methods where European exports from companies that

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