Well, that was a week, huh?

From American public media.

This is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Friday today. This one is the 28th of February. It is good as always to have you along, everybody.

In no particular order as we get going today, trade and tariffs, a little inflation and maybe some interest rates, and because we can't not the politics of this economy.

Catherine Rampel is at the Washington Post. Honest Swanson is at the New York Times. Hey, you two.

Hey, Kay. Honest Swanson, we begin with you and I offer my condolences as the person at the Times who has to cover trade and trade policy in this economy right now.

I'm not going to ask you where things stand.

I'm not going to ask you what's going on.

I'm going to talk to you or want you to talk to me, rather, about a great piece in the paper today that you and your colleagues had about how tariffs may not actually be able to do everything that Donald Trump wants them to do everything everywhere all at

once, you know?

Thank you.

Yeah, definitely.

So it's been sort of an unending parade of tariff threats, right?

And the president has talked about a few different rationales for these tariffs.

So he's talked about them bringing supply chains back to the United States,

using them as a source of leverage against other countries, and then also always raising massive

amounts of revenue for the United States. And so my colleagues and I just pointed out that a lot of

those goals just directly undermine and contradict each other. So, you know, for example, in raising revenue,

if you want to collect revenue, you need people to continue buying imports, which means that

they're not switching to buying American goods instead and helping American factories. So,

you know, it's a problem for the president's agenda. At some point, he is going to have to pick and choose. And right now, I think, you know, he's a problem for the president's agenda at some point he is going to have to pick and

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