The Economic Outlook: The View from The White House

WSJ Opinion: Free Expression

Gerard Baker, Editor at Large, The Wall Street Journal

Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 591 Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s been a month since Donald Trump celebrated his “Liberation Day,” announcing a wide range of what he called reciprocal tariffs on a number of countries, with China facing the steepest. Since then matters have been on a roller coaster ride as the President first fiercely defended the plan and then paused it for most countries except China. While fears about the impact on the U.S. and the world have escalated, the economy seems to be toddling along. But great uncertainty remains - not just on tariffs but on the scope and scale of Republican tax plans and the budget. On this episode of Free Expression, Director of the National Economic Council of the United States Kevin Hassett discusses the latest job numbers to come out, how the tariffs began as a place of negotiation, and how the tax plan is progressing through Congress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Opinion Pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.
0:08.8	Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page. I'm Jerry Baker, editor-at-large of the journal. Thanks for joining us.
0:15.0	I do hope you're subscribing. If you're not, please do subscribe and do leave us a nice review at iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening.
0:22.4	This week, what else? We're going to talk about the economy, of course, the US economy,
0:26.5	which is, I think, is the top of everybody's mind right now has been for some time.
0:31.1	We are now, according this on Friday, May the 2nd.
0:33.2	We're exactly a month away from Liberation Day, the day when President Donald Trump,
0:36.8	of course, announced his plan to impose tariffs on imports from every single country in the world,
0:42.3	some more than others, of course, depending on how large the US trade deficit was with them.
0:47.1	As we know, though that announcement caused a certain amount of consternation in financial markets
0:53.0	and indeed with pretty well everybody around
0:54.9	the world except those who work directly for Donald Trump. And over the course of the next week,
0:59.0	President Trump announced a pause on the tariffs except for those on China, the swinging tariffs on
1:04.0	China, 145%. And since then, we've gone back and forth on this question of whether or not we will
1:09.4	have deals with the various countries. President and his team are negotiating deals with many countries, most
1:15.0	important of all China, and we're going to have to wait and see still the impact of those
1:19.4	deals and what effect they have on the tariffs, and of course, ultimately what effect those
1:23.1	tariffs will have on the economy. But that's not the only news in the economy. As all of
1:26.5	this storm and
1:27.5	drang unfolds around whether or not President Trump is creating a new world order or plunging
1:33.0	the US and indeed much of the world into a period of economic stagnation, the economy itself
1:37.5	seems to be continuing relatively robust way. We had weak GDP numbers for the first quarter of
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