Stephanie Pomboy: What Impact Will The New Trump Tariffs Have?

**Adam Taggart** (0:02)
Okay, we should be live here. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart. I am your host for this channel, but I am not your host for this conversation, because this is Monday mornings with Stephanie Pomboy. Stephanie, how are you?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:17)
I'm good. How are you doing?

**Adam Taggart** (0:19)
I'm great. Well, Stephanie, I don't know what we're going to talk about today, because it was a pretty uneventful weekend.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:25)
And a quiet Monday morning, too.

**Adam Taggart** (0:29)
Literally, folks, we were just talking before we put the camera on here. Obviously, tariffs are going to be a huge topic that we dig into today. Pretty much the tariff situation completely changed while I was in the shower right before getting ready for this interview. So, Steph, I don't envy you the seat you're in today, having to comment about the ground that is shifting underneath you in real time as we're having this conversation. Folks, we will try to get to as many of your questions as we can during this conversation, so feel free to start asking them in the live chat there. I'll start pulling them in in a little bit. But let's see, Steph, I know you had the wisdom or the folly of asking your ex-followers what topics to focus on today, and I know you got a firehose of topics. I think we're going to pull tariffs out of there. No big surprise. And you also have some recent payroll data we should talk about, too, correct?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (1:26)
Yeah, well, because we're getting that number this week, and in addition to the January number, we're going to get the official final revisions to employment for 2024 So people will focus on that once we get through all the tariff headlines the early part of this week. So, but there's a lot going on. And yeah, I think those are probably the two main topics just to keep it streamlined because there's plenty to talk about on both of those, I think.

**Adam Taggart** (1:55)
OK, and folks, I promised Stephanie that we would end promptly at the end of the hour just because, as you may remember, she had a couple of technical issues last week and she has upgraded her system, but she's got an IT guy coming in to kind of put the final bow on it. So we want to make sure that gets done. All right, Steph, well, look, I mean, I guess we can jump into this any way you like, but OK, big tariffs were announced on America's major trading partners, many of America's major trading partners over the weekend, 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. I think Canadian energy exports only got a 10% tariff, and then China got a 10% tariff on goods from there. So, you know, the questions I planned to ask you still sort of stand, which is, you know, what are the likely impacts of these tariffs? Now, the news, just in case folks haven't seen the latest headline, is that a couple minutes ago, the president of Mexico just announced that she was going to send 10,000 troops to the border. And essentially, as best I can tell, only from reading the headlines, I haven't had time to dig deeply, is that she's basically bought Mexico a month by doing so. So, month relief on the tariffs, and I guess it's sort of TBD how things go on the border in the next 30 days, right?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (3:15)
Yeah. And I don't think you've missed anything because I was trying to read the details beneath the headlines, and right now, that's all we've got. And we don't have a lot of detail as to what exactly the agreement was other than the 10,000 troops along the border. But clearly, if Trump's objective here was to stop the flow of fentanyl and illegal immigrants into the country, this tactic seems to be paying dividends immediately. And obviously, the markets are now whip-sawing all over the place because this idea that we were suddenly going to have this massive increase in the cost of our imports is looking like it's maybe not going to come, or at least be not as dramatic as anticipated initially. But I think that's kind of a key topic to focus on here is there's a raging debate as to what are the inflationary and other impacts of tariffs. And so far, it looks like Canada is sticking to its guns here, so we haven't seen any capitulation there. Quite the contrary, I think Trudeau was talking about some retaliatory tariffs on their end. And then you get into a full trade war because in Trump's executive order, if the targeted countries that he imposes tariffs on retaliate, he then has the opportunity to retaliate back. So, I mean, you could really see this escalate quickly. Right.