U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross discusses U.S. trade policy, the potential to modify the behavior of ZTE Corp, and his short selling on Navigator Holdings Ltd. He speaks with Bloomberg’s David Westin on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc, Also read Lear Capital: Financial Products You Should Avoid?
Wilbur Ross On Trade, Economic Growth, ZTE, Short Selling
Transcript
Now I'm here at Select USA which is our big annual foreign direct investment conference. We have over 3000 delegates here from 66 foreign countries and they are all here because they're interested in increasing their investment in the United States. And I believe over the next couple of days we will have some very big announcements to make about new transactions that these folks are entering into. So I don't think that that's true that there's some big change. I think the media have been very negative on the Trump administration. They picked out some little companies somewhere and they say oh my goodness this guy is having trouble and extrapolates that into the whole country. OK fair enough Mister said he'll take one it's not a little company let's say Daimler which is a big company that this this morning said because of the issues with China they are taking down their profits. And that as you probably know the stock price went down and took the stock 600 ran with it and actually took S&P futures with it. That's not a small company sir. No it's not. I don't hear what we have done that hurt. Well what it is is the perception and position by China of tariffs in response to what we've done on exporting from South Carolina to China. And that was in direct response to the actions we've taken out the retaliation. Sure. Well naturally there's going to be some retaliation by the foreign companies countries and they will try to figure out politically sensitive areas to deal with.
But at the end of the day we are a net importer not a net exporter and that leaves a very fundamental truth. Take China. They sell us around half a billion half a trillion dollars a year of goods will sell them around 150 billion. That means once they put tariffs if it went that far on the whole hundred and fifty they have nothing more than that they can do we could go theoretically all the way up to the five hundred. That's not a very easy game for them to play. And it's similar ratios with the other countries. That's what President Trump mean right when he says that if he really does get to be a big war we have many more bullets than any of these other countries right when it comes to tariffs. But there are other ways obviously of hurting imports nontariff barriers. And the last time that China actually. What they specifically said was quantitative and qualitative so that terrorists are not the only way that they can retaliate. No it's true and it's not nor are they the only way that we can retaliate. The truth is that China.
