August 1, 2025 • 13 mins
As President Donald Trump’s goalposts for his trade war continue to shift, Big Take host Sarah Holder sits down with Bloomberg’s global trade editor Brendan Murray to discuss where things stand and how Trump has dramatically shifted America’s approach to international trade deals.
Read more: How Trump Let $1 Trillion Worth of Imports Escape His Tariff Hammer
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news, but our top story
this morning, President Trump sets a ten percent minimum global tariff.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
There's been a flurry of deal making and deal breaking
in the run up to President Trump's August first tariff
deadlineident Trump has announced the framework for a trade deal
with the United Kingdom. China, of course, emerging from that
meeting saying an understanding was reached to extend the tariff truce,
while the US side is still saying nothing is final
until President Trump signs off. One made a trade deal
(00:35):
with the European U, Philippines, Indonesia, and the United States
fifth the largest trading partner, Japan. Late last night, just
hours before the deadline, Trump signed an executive order announcing
new US tariffs on dozens of trading partners. Trump said
the new tariffs will go into effect next week on
August seventh. Bloomberg Economics reports that if all the announced
(00:58):
levies are implemented as promised, the average US teriff rate
will go up to more than fifteen percent.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
The most surprising thing to me is how President Trump
has turned people's perspective on trade around completely in just
a matter of months.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Brendon Murray has overseen trade coverage for Bloomberg since twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Trade deals in the traditional sense are about increasing trade.
What President Trump is doing is literally designed to lower trade,
to bring production home, and to sever some of those
economic ties with countries that we've been doing business with
for a long time.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
As a world braces for Trump's reciprocal tariffs to actually
for real this time hit global trade, Brendon says the
whiplash of the trade war isn't over because many of
the details of these trade deals are still a moving target.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
What we're seeing is the Trump administration hammering out the
broad frameworks, trying to get some headline numbers that jump
off the page, and to get some commitments from countries
that have been unwilling to open up their markets or
invest more in the US than they have in the past.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So is the strategy working. I'm Sarah Holder, and this
is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the
show Making Sense of Trump's latest trade deadline, I sit
down with Bloomberg's Global Trade editor Brendan Murray to discuss
where things stand in the president's ongoing trade war, how
(02:37):
much work remains, and how Trump has reshaped America's approach
to trade deals. It can be challenging to keep up
with the shifting terms of Trump's trade war and all
the deals his administration is trying to broker. Brennan, how
have you been making sense of this? Do you have
(03:00):
a big whiteboard up in the office or something.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yeah, I guess you could say it's a whiteboard, but
it's more like an Excel spreadsheet, a timeline, some post
it notes, and you know a bunch of sort of
random things that you know you have to move around.
This is a very fast moving story. President Trump will
say he's doing well in trade negotiations with big economies,
and then the next day he might say, you know,
(03:24):
deals off. You know, you're facing a tariff of twenty
percent or whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
You've been overseeing Bloomberg's trade coverage since twenty nineteen. I'm
wondering how this negotiation process has been different than once
you've seen before.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I think it's been very different. The first way it's
been different is that trade negotiations are notoriously long, grueling.
They go back and forth, They go between governments, and
then governments go back to their industries and they go
line by line and that takes time, and the biggest
(03:57):
difference with President Trump's trade deals are they're in warp speed.
They are they're moving in weeks and a couple of
months rather than a couple of years. So that's just
the way President Trump operates and did so in the
private sector, and he's taken that style to governing in
the White House and using tariffs as kind of the
(04:18):
big point of leverage that he can use over countries
in these discussions.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
How do geopolitics come into play when we're talking about
the trade deals of the Trump presidency versus how trade
deals have historically been negotiated.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, I think what we're seeing emerging is President Trump
see tariffs as a way to not only reorder the
global trading system that he's complained about since the nineteen eighties,
but to get countries in line with what he thinks
that the US priorities are. We've seen it on a
number of cases recently. We've seen it with Brazil when
(04:53):
he's threatened Brazil with a fifty percent tariff because of
some things going on in their domestic politics. We've seen
it recently with India where he says we're going to
put a twenty five percent tariff on you across the board,
and we're going to penalize you for buying Russian oil.
He's also intervened in the Cambodia Thailand conflict and said,
(05:13):
you know, trade is going to be painful for you
if you don't call a ceasefire. And so he's really
using tariffs as a tool of foreign policy, not just
of economic policy anymore.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Do you think that strategy will be able to be
used in the same way even after these deals are
set in stone or is the answer that they'll never
be set in stone.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, I don't think they're really ever going to be
set in stone. President Trump is feeling pretty emboldened by
these trade deals that are coming together. They kind of
feed on themselves. Once you get Japan, then you've got
leverage over South Korea, And once you get leverage over
South Korea, then you get leverage over other countries in
Southeast Asia. The same goes for the European Union. You know,
(05:55):
once you can get Germany on side, then you know
France has to go along with it. So I think
there's a sense that this isn't going to end after
August first, that this is going to be an ongoing
way that President Trump conducts his diplomacy as tariffs that
he can use to accomplish what he's trying to accomplish
(06:17):
in the world of geopolitics as well.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
After the break, how Trump's trade goals stack up against
reality on the global stage. Trump's so called Liberation Day
unleashed tariffs and chaos into the global economy in April.
Since then, his administration has announced a handful of new
(06:43):
trade deals with details that are changing by the day.
So Brendan, when you think about the president's stated goals,
and when you think about the effect that this trade
negotiation strategy has already had on our relationships with other
countries and on the economy, both domestically and abroad, is
the strategy working.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Well so far? I'll tell you up a few of
what we have so far. We have deals with big
economies like the European Union, Japan, the UK, South Korea,
and a handful of countries in Asia. And the total
of those announced deals so far that's about twenty five
percent of the global economy. So that's not a small number.
(07:23):
Most people would say those are accomplishments, but getting those
from fact sheets and social media posts into actual enforceable
binding agreements is a whole nother step that we're still
going to have to see play out. Because you see
these big numbers thrown out from Japan or Korea or
(07:44):
the European Union, these purchase agreements where they say we'll
buy this hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American products,
American energy products for instance. Those are going to take
a lot of calculating to even see if there's the
capacity to do that. But this strategy isn't working for everyone.
The most obvious example of that is India. India was
(08:06):
in the lead pack a couple of months ago when
these negotiations started off. President trub said nobody's ever done
a deal with India. I'm going to do a deal
with India. And he came out recently and said, you know,
no deal twenty five percent tariff. Now, he did leave
that open to further negotiations. But it's a strategy that's
had mixed success and there's a lot still to verify
(08:30):
and to see how it's executed to say that it's
working and then it's actually successful.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Well, we've also seen a lot of headlines on countries
agreeing to something seemingly not related to the trade deal,
like a promise to buy more gas, for example, or
these investment deals and purchasing agreements that you mentioned with
details to be hammered out later. How atypical is that
to see these kinds of ancillary agreements being made on
(08:56):
top of trade negotiations.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Well, it's pretty atypical. Well if you compare it to
the way trade has operated for the past several decades.
Trade in the globalized system that emerged from the Second
World War was based on a consistent lowering of tariffs
and a sense of the more we trade with each other,
the better off we are. What we're seeing from the
(09:19):
Trump administration increasingly in these agreements to purchase certain goods
from the US is something called managed trade. It's basically
the government saying here's how much you should buy, rather
than the companies that need these materials deciding for themselves.
Some would say it's coercive. It's what China has done
(09:42):
is kind of push its weight around and with smaller countries,
and it's leading down a road, the critics would say,
to where it's less efficient for the economy. It's not
the most effective way to run the global trading system.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Is it fair to say that managed trade kind of
flies in the face of free trade? Is managed trade
free trades opposite?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's all sorts of different
kinds of mechanisms for managed trade. But this is a
government dictating to a certain extent what one country should
purchase from it, rather than the private sector deciding what
it should purchase from abroad. So it is a big
sea change from the way things have run in the past. Now,
(10:24):
it's not uncommon for countries to agree to say we
will purchase your supplies over another country's supplies because that
country is an adversaries. Defense weapons is a good example
of that. But to have it applied broadly to a
trading relationship is something that we haven't seen for a
(10:44):
long time. Brennan.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
You've talked us through the fact that trade deals often
take years to hammer out, and these new deals have
been figured out in a matter of months. Has this
process fundamentally changed the way trade negotiations might unfold? Is
this going to be a hallmark of the Trump administration
or could it ripple beyond it?
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Well, so far, none of the other countries that Trump
is engaged with have gone toe to toe with him
and adopted this approach. This is the approach Donald Trump
brought to the White House from his experience as a
real estate developer. I'm not sure we're going to see
other countries that are still committed to a globalized free
(11:27):
trading system suddenly turn protectionists and start adopting the same approach.
There's a lot of analysts who would say, you know,
the US is a big economy, but there's another seventy
five percent of global GDP out there for US to
do business with, and a lot of countries will just
do less trade with the United States and we'll try
to find some others where we can continue along the
(11:50):
principles of a rules based trading system geared toward lower
tariffs without the US in the picture.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Does that scare the analysts you speak to.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
A lot of people see this as the free trade
pendulum swinging back in the other direction under President Trump.
But how far that swings, you know, whether that takes
the whole world with it is still an open question.
We're watching this experiment in real time, and it's nobody
really knows where it's going to end up.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
The show is hosted by Me, David gera wanj and
Seleia Mosen. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox,
Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patti hirsh Rachel Lewis, Krisky, Naomi In,
Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Subia, Julia Weaver,
(12:42):
Yang Yong and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from the
Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com,
subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com Slash Podcast offer. Thanks
for listening. We'll be back on Monday.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news, but our top story
this morning, President Trump sets a ten percent minimum global tariff.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
There's been a flurry of deal making and deal breaking
in the run up to President Trump's August first tariff
deadlineident Trump has announced the framework for a trade deal
with the United Kingdom. China, of course, emerging from that
meeting saying an understanding was reached to extend the tariff truce,
while the US side is still saying nothing is final
until President Trump signs off. One made a trade deal
(00:35):
with the European U, Philippines, Indonesia, and the United States
fifth the largest trading partner, Japan. Late last night, just
hours before the deadline, Trump signed an executive order announcing
new US tariffs on dozens of trading partners. Trump said
the new tariffs will go into effect next week on
August seventh. Bloomberg Economics reports that if all the announced
(00:58):
levies are implemented as promised, the average US teriff rate
will go up to more than fifteen percent.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
The most surprising thing to me is how President Trump
has turned people's perspective on trade around completely in just
a matter of months.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Brendon Murray has overseen trade coverage for Bloomberg since twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Trade deals in the traditional sense are about increasing trade.
What President Trump is doing is literally designed to lower trade,
to bring production home, and to sever some of those
economic ties with countries that we've been doing business with
for a long time.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
As a world braces for Trump's reciprocal tariffs to actually
for real this time hit global trade, Brendon says the
whiplash of the trade war isn't over because many of
the details of these trade deals are still a moving target.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
What we're seeing is the Trump administration hammering out the
broad frameworks, trying to get some headline numbers that jump
off the page, and to get some commitments from countries
that have been unwilling to open up their markets or
invest more in the US than they have in the past.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So is the strategy working. I'm Sarah Holder, and this
is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the
show Making Sense of Trump's latest trade deadline, I sit
down with Bloomberg's Global Trade editor Brendan Murray to discuss
where things stand in the president's ongoing trade war, how
(02:37):
much work remains, and how Trump has reshaped America's approach
to trade deals. It can be challenging to keep up
with the shifting terms of Trump's trade war and all
the deals his administration is trying to broker. Brennan, how
have you been making sense of this? Do you have
(03:00):
a big whiteboard up in the office or something.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yeah, I guess you could say it's a whiteboard, but
it's more like an Excel spreadsheet, a timeline, some post
it notes, and you know a bunch of sort of
random things that you know you have to move around.
This is a very fast moving story. President Trump will
say he's doing well in trade negotiations with big economies,
and then the next day he might say, you know,
(03:24):
deals off. You know, you're facing a tariff of twenty
percent or whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
You've been overseeing Bloomberg's trade coverage since twenty nineteen. I'm
wondering how this negotiation process has been different than once
you've seen before.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I think it's been very different. The first way it's
been different is that trade negotiations are notoriously long, grueling.
They go back and forth, They go between governments, and
then governments go back to their industries and they go
line by line and that takes time, and the biggest
(03:57):
difference with President Trump's trade deals are they're in warp speed.
They are they're moving in weeks and a couple of
months rather than a couple of years. So that's just
the way President Trump operates and did so in the
private sector, and he's taken that style to governing in
the White House and using tariffs as kind of the
(04:18):
big point of leverage that he can use over countries
in these discussions.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
How do geopolitics come into play when we're talking about
the trade deals of the Trump presidency versus how trade
deals have historically been negotiated.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, I think what we're seeing emerging is President Trump
see tariffs as a way to not only reorder the
global trading system that he's complained about since the nineteen eighties,
but to get countries in line with what he thinks
that the US priorities are. We've seen it on a
number of cases recently. We've seen it with Brazil when
(04:53):
he's threatened Brazil with a fifty percent tariff because of
some things going on in their domestic politics. We've seen
it recently with India where he says we're going to
put a twenty five percent tariff on you across the board,
and we're going to penalize you for buying Russian oil.
He's also intervened in the Cambodia Thailand conflict and said,
(05:13):
you know, trade is going to be painful for you
if you don't call a ceasefire. And so he's really
using tariffs as a tool of foreign policy, not just
of economic policy anymore.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Do you think that strategy will be able to be
used in the same way even after these deals are
set in stone or is the answer that they'll never
be set in stone.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, I don't think they're really ever going to be
set in stone. President Trump is feeling pretty emboldened by
these trade deals that are coming together. They kind of
feed on themselves. Once you get Japan, then you've got
leverage over South Korea, And once you get leverage over
South Korea, then you get leverage over other countries in
Southeast Asia. The same goes for the European Union. You know,
(05:55):
once you can get Germany on side, then you know
France has to go along with it. So I think
there's a sense that this isn't going to end after
August first, that this is going to be an ongoing
way that President Trump conducts his diplomacy as tariffs that
he can use to accomplish what he's trying to accomplish
(06:17):
in the world of geopolitics as well.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
After the break, how Trump's trade goals stack up against
reality on the global stage. Trump's so called Liberation Day
unleashed tariffs and chaos into the global economy in April.
Since then, his administration has announced a handful of new
(06:43):
trade deals with details that are changing by the day.
So Brendan, when you think about the president's stated goals,
and when you think about the effect that this trade
negotiation strategy has already had on our relationships with other
countries and on the economy, both domestically and abroad, is
the strategy working.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Well so far? I'll tell you up a few of
what we have so far. We have deals with big
economies like the European Union, Japan, the UK, South Korea,
and a handful of countries in Asia. And the total
of those announced deals so far that's about twenty five
percent of the global economy. So that's not a small number.
(07:23):
Most people would say those are accomplishments, but getting those
from fact sheets and social media posts into actual enforceable
binding agreements is a whole nother step that we're still
going to have to see play out. Because you see
these big numbers thrown out from Japan or Korea or
(07:44):
the European Union, these purchase agreements where they say we'll
buy this hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American products,
American energy products for instance. Those are going to take
a lot of calculating to even see if there's the
capacity to do that. But this strategy isn't working for everyone.
The most obvious example of that is India. India was
(08:06):
in the lead pack a couple of months ago when
these negotiations started off. President trub said nobody's ever done
a deal with India. I'm going to do a deal
with India. And he came out recently and said, you know,
no deal twenty five percent tariff. Now, he did leave
that open to further negotiations. But it's a strategy that's
had mixed success and there's a lot still to verify
(08:30):
and to see how it's executed to say that it's
working and then it's actually successful.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Well, we've also seen a lot of headlines on countries
agreeing to something seemingly not related to the trade deal,
like a promise to buy more gas, for example, or
these investment deals and purchasing agreements that you mentioned with
details to be hammered out later. How atypical is that
to see these kinds of ancillary agreements being made on
(08:56):
top of trade negotiations.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Well, it's pretty atypical. Well if you compare it to
the way trade has operated for the past several decades.
Trade in the globalized system that emerged from the Second
World War was based on a consistent lowering of tariffs
and a sense of the more we trade with each other,
the better off we are. What we're seeing from the
(09:19):
Trump administration increasingly in these agreements to purchase certain goods
from the US is something called managed trade. It's basically
the government saying here's how much you should buy, rather
than the companies that need these materials deciding for themselves.
Some would say it's coercive. It's what China has done
(09:42):
is kind of push its weight around and with smaller countries,
and it's leading down a road, the critics would say,
to where it's less efficient for the economy. It's not
the most effective way to run the global trading system.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Is it fair to say that managed trade kind of
flies in the face of free trade? Is managed trade
free trades opposite?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's all sorts of different
kinds of mechanisms for managed trade. But this is a
government dictating to a certain extent what one country should
purchase from it, rather than the private sector deciding what
it should purchase from abroad. So it is a big
sea change from the way things have run in the past. Now,
(10:24):
it's not uncommon for countries to agree to say we
will purchase your supplies over another country's supplies because that
country is an adversaries. Defense weapons is a good example
of that. But to have it applied broadly to a
trading relationship is something that we haven't seen for a
(10:44):
long time. Brennan.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
You've talked us through the fact that trade deals often
take years to hammer out, and these new deals have
been figured out in a matter of months. Has this
process fundamentally changed the way trade negotiations might unfold? Is
this going to be a hallmark of the Trump administration
or could it ripple beyond it?
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Well, so far, none of the other countries that Trump
is engaged with have gone toe to toe with him
and adopted this approach. This is the approach Donald Trump
brought to the White House from his experience as a
real estate developer. I'm not sure we're going to see
other countries that are still committed to a globalized free
(11:27):
trading system suddenly turn protectionists and start adopting the same approach.
There's a lot of analysts who would say, you know,
the US is a big economy, but there's another seventy
five percent of global GDP out there for US to
do business with, and a lot of countries will just
do less trade with the United States and we'll try
to find some others where we can continue along the
(11:50):
principles of a rules based trading system geared toward lower
tariffs without the US in the picture.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Does that scare the analysts you speak to.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
A lot of people see this as the free trade
pendulum swinging back in the other direction under President Trump.
But how far that swings, you know, whether that takes
the whole world with it is still an open question.
We're watching this experiment in real time, and it's nobody
really knows where it's going to end up.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
The show is hosted by Me, David gera wanj and
Seleia Mosen. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox,
Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patti hirsh Rachel Lewis, Krisky, Naomi In,
Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Subia, Julia Weaver,
(12:42):
Yang Yong and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from the
Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com,
subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com Slash Podcast offer. Thanks
for listening. We'll be back on Monday.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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