Kyle Bass, Hayman Capital Management founder and CIO, discusses why he supports Trump’s approach to the trade war with China and why he thinks Trump’s lack of predictability is good for the U.S.
Q2 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
Hedge Fund Manager Kyle Bass On Why He Supports Trump's Trade War With China
Transcript
Potential trade war with China and heightened tensions have dominated investor attention for the last few months. Most economists CEOs and hedge fund managers who've come on a air of criticized the approach except for some notable exceptions which include. Our next guest hedge fund investor Kyle Bass joining us now exclusively. In the Capital Management's founder chief investment officer as well Cao. You and I talked to this a few months ago. I know at least at this point about the aluminum and steel tariffs and you were sort of explaining the rationale behind them and why you supported them. Let's now fast forward to where we are now with this rhetoric back and forth. The president continues to say tariffs are going to be a benefit. The Chinese saying they have time to fight to the end and time will prove the U.S. eventually makes a fool of itself. Why won't we make a fool of ourselves.
Yeah I think David I think that the key is to understand this and that an even larger picture than trade and it's the geopolitics of China you know whether you look at the Defense Department reports or whether you look at the reports from the U.S. Trade Representative Mike Housers office you see that we all know that China steals two to three hundred billion dollars a year of intellectual property from us. And they've done so for over a decade. And so what we're trying to do is counterbalance China is offensive and China's offensive is both through economic coercion and even given the fact that they believe in their own economic strength in the last decade. Now that now they're starting to translate that into geopolitical coersion both with the One Belt One Road and the debts that it offers to other countries as well as its military moving around a little bit more aggressively in the South China Sea it's all rooted in the fact it's all rooted in with the basis of their of their strong position in the Globe economically and from a trade perspective. And literally we're just pushing back a little bit and we haven't pushed back since Kissinger and Nixon pivoted to China to counterbalance Russia in the early 1970s. I know that's a long time continuum but it's really important for us to try to level the playing field a little bit here.
