YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Coggan

lines on the record: 35
first: 2025-07-17
most recent: 2025-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“China's dominance, and that is being cut away. And that would also have generated employment for many people. So, you know, I know perhaps some of the listeners and viewers of this will think I'm being relentlessly negative. It's a relentlessly negative policy. It's as if he's taken everything that...”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then involves in training, Germany has an excellent apprenticeship program, for example, and you try and get the people out of their old jobs and into new jobs. This requires a fairly active state. But the Republicans generally are against the active state. They're against interference in the economy, which is a complete act of hypocrisy because there's no greater interference in the economy than imposing tariffs, which is trying to dictate companies where they buy their goods from. So you would need an industrial strategy that goes to the places in the heartlands which have lost jobs and try and generate industries. And that, of course, was not the Biden regime was perfect, but some of what they were doing, Texas has this very flourishing wind power industry. And all the subsidies for that are being cut in the new budget plan. There was a chance to build a great new industry to challenge”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“MPIC came out of a study of the Gila Monster, which is an Asian lizard which can go a long time without eating. They studied it and they found there was a particular enzyme, I think, in the lizard that allowed it to go a long time without eating. And that turned eventually into these weight loss drugs. I'm sure when somebody was studying it a year in some congressmen would have leapt on it and said, why are we sending federal funds to examine the Ghila monster? How ridiculous? But that's the kind of basic research you need sometimes to make great scientific breakthroughs. So they're going about it entirely the wrong way, competing with China. That's one and two. On the deaths of despair, then I think you're absolutely right. Globalization can have losers. So then what you have in Europe, in places like Sweden or Denmark, is a fairly good welfare state which compensates those losers.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's a lot in that those two questions, as you say. First of all, I'd say that China does cheat, and China is a rival. And as I mentioned before, if you want to concentrate on dealing with China, don't alienate all your other allies by suddenly imposing tariffs on them or threatening them as with Canada and Denmark, which rules Greenland, or indeed Mexico. So that's a very odd approach. If your main concern is China. Secondly, if you're worried about China, then I think the US's great advantage is its technological lead and its research base. So don't attack the great universities of the country. Don't cut funding from the National Institutes for Health, which fund in 99% of all new drugs between 2010 and 2020. Don't disdain basic research as a lovely example of Ozempic.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dominic Cummings, who was the Boris Johnson's advisor for a while, talked about the dead cat strategy. And the dead cat strategy is things are going difficultly. So you throw a dead cat on the table and everybody looks at the dead cat and ignores the problem you're having. And the inequality in the US is such that people feel aggrieved about it. Sue, you throw the dead cat of immigration, of illegal immigration on the table, and people are concerned about that and not about, you know, the lower worker rights in the US or the fall in union membership, which of course Trump opposes. If you go back to this supposed golden era, like the car industry, GM Ford Chrysler, there was one reason why they paid very well. They had very strong unions. And the union membership have declined a lot over the last 50 years. And Trump certainly doesn't want that to come back.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say maybe it was 80 million, and now it's 320 million. Well, if there was only so much work to do, then there'd be 240 million unemployed, right? But that's not the case because every person who works earns a wage and thus is a source of demand. So as immigrants come in, they earn wages, they spend money on that economy, which employs other people.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you're quite right. And a substantial proportion, I think it's about a quarter of the unicorns, the company's worth more than a billion dollars. They are run by foreign people. And, of course, Elon Musk himself, Steve Jobs, these are people born outside the US. But I don't think one should also downplay the contribution made by low-skilled workers, which are incredibly important to farms, for example, who's going to pick the fruit in the US. They're incredibly important to many service sectors. And I think fundamentally, Trump believes in the what economists call the lump of labor fallacy, which is there's only a certain amount of jobs to go round. And that if one immigrant takes a job, then it denies a job to a domestic born person. And the easiest way to disprove this is to think back to how many people were in the US in 1900.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“End to immigration into the US. And you need a bigger workforce for the economy to grow. And the Dallas Fed just put out a paper within the last week or two, which showed that because immigration has slowed, that's going to take around three quarters of a percentage point to a full percentage point off US growth, other things being equal. So you're getting higher prices from tariffs, you're getting slower growth from the lack of immigration, and you'll probably, because you're trying to replace efficient foreign producers with inefficient domestic producers getting a less efficient economy as well. So it's a terrible combination.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then of course it's in the strongest position to retaliate because of products like rare earths where it has a virtual monopoly. So I think we should almost try and regard hope that the Trump administration is an interlude and that the US will return in 2029 to being its relatively benign self, that it will not demand that Canada become the 51st state or threaten to annex Greenland or whatever things that you, you know, if you'd said 15 years ago that a US president might say you'd have said, well, this is ridiculous script, you need to send that back. Nobody, that's never going to happen. And the argument, I think, is that this will not be good for the US. It won't be good for the rest of the world, but it probably will be worse for the US. We haven't mentioned a lot the budget, which of course is taking money from the poor and giving to the rich, or the sort of virtual”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one tactic would be to carry on as if the US wasn't behaving as it did. So try and stick to the global trading rules between ourselves. There's a lot of the world, the US is a big economy. It's over 20% of the world economy. It's not over 20% of world trade. So the vast bulk of world trade goes on without the US. So if the EU, China, India, Latin America, they all try and reduce barriers between each other, then there's plenty of scope for the world economy to get it's going to be still very damaging, but the damage will be immensely reduced if they don't respond in the way that they might be tempted to in retaliating. China obviously has retaliated probably about the only country that's retaliated significantly. There is a lot of history in China that it does not want to be bullied by Western nations and one could understand.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that is immensely weakening the Western world. And if the next crisis is political as well as financial, I don't think we can expect the kind of coordinated response that we had in the past. Remember he left the G7 one day early just now and in past efforts he's looked pretty bored because he doesn't really like listening to other people.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Biggest threat he'd makes. The second institution that I think he is destroying is the idea of the Federal Reserve, which is the US Central Bank and which cooperates with other central banks. He already has attacked the independence of the US Central Bank. And in past crises, we've seen the Federal Reserve intervene to try and help other countries out by lending them dollars, for example, in a crisis. And that has made the crisis shorter. I mean, there was a famous picture, I think, on the, I can't remember which magazine was, the Committee to Save the World, but it Alan Greenspan, I think, and Robert Rubin. Now, it's very hard to imagine that he would allow the Fed.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's that he changes his mind all the time. So in the book, there's a subtimetable of how many different trade policies he suggested and then withdrawn. And probably by the in between us taping this and the program appearing, there'll probably be some more changes as well. And if you think about what businesses always say they want certainty, and how can you be certain what to do? Let's say you believed in Trump and you thought that you should bring your business back to the US. Well, you know, it was one thing when the tariff on Vietnam was 45%, but then a few days later it was 10%, and now it seems to be 20%. So what would you do in those circumstances? You'll probably do nothing. You'll just wait and not invest until the whole thing settles down. But the problem is it may never settle down. He'll have something that he sees that he complains about and therefore put tariffs on for some other reason. So that's the...”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Core rule, the most favoured nation rule, which was if you offer a special deal to some other country, you must offer it to all other countries. Everybody had to be treated equally. And it's that that Trump dislikes because it sets some sort of external constraint on his policies. And it's that institution which is suffering most. In the first, his first term of office, he stopped appointing people to the appellate body of the world, which rules when there's some dispute. So that doesn't operate anymore. He's just ignoring all the World Trade Organization rules now by everything he's doing. So that institution, that framework, which had taken like 70 years to build and was ignorantlessly successful, is being destroyed. And he clearly has no idea about what to replace it with, except doing these deals with individual countries. And the danger of that, of course, is not just that it's confusing and...”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, well, first, let's go back in history a bit. So after the First World War, the US withdrew from the world, and we had a dreadful period of protectionism and the rise of fascism and communism. And so after the Second World War, the very wise leaders of the US, Harry S. Truman, George Marshall, decided that wasn't going to happen. So they had a program of martial aid for European countries to try and revive their economies because they realized that Europeans were great customers for U.S. businesses. And they also tried to remove trade barriers. And they set up a thing called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and gradually, slowly but steadily over the next 60 or 70 years, more countries were brought into this system, tariffs were lowered, trade volume expanded, forty five fold relative to 1945 in volume terms. And it became the World Trade Organization and the World Trade Organization had a kind of”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the North American free trade agreement until 1995. So that stagnation of real wages was not down to those kind of trade agreements about which Trump complains. And the US is a uniquely unequal country in terms of the Western world. The top 10% of Americans...”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And those workers would be less productive making shoes and textiles than they are in the jobs they currently do. So what's the point of that? There's quite a good example with coal. Coal employed a lot more people, right, in 70 years ago and coal employment has been going down ever since. But coal output actually peaked in about 2008, only 15 years ago. Coal is one product that the US hardly ever imports. It produces all the coal it needs. So it's not trade that's forced the coal industry to lose lots of jobs. And then if I can make one other point, there was a problem with stalling real wages in the US. The biggest problem was from 1973 to 1995. China for much of that period was only just coming into the global market. It wasn't until the nineties that it really started to expand manufacturing. The US didn't join NAFTA, which people complain.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hundred years ago, most Americans would have been employed in farming. Now there are many times more Americans in the US, but they're not starving, even though only 1% or so of Americans work on a farm. That's because farms are immensely more productive. And so you can make more stuff with fewer people. And as you say, the US has concentrated, as all economic logic suggests it should, on high margin things. To try and get people back making shoes or t-shirts would mean that either you have to pay them the kind of wages paid in Bangladesh or Vietnam, which is currently making them, which is very unlikely, because of course you wouldn't be able to afford to live in the US on those kind of wages, or the price of those goods would have to go up enormously. And you would have to transfer workers from other industries to put them into shoes and textiles.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's interesting that one president did manage to get manufacturing jobs up, and that was Joe Biden. There were 600,000 more manufacturing jobs when he left office than when he started. That was partly to do with the pandemic ending and people coming back to work, but it was also subsidies for green industries and other industries that he was trying to boost. And subsidizing your domestic industry is a much better policy than tariffing your foreign competitors. But if you look at the figures for manufacturing employment across the Western world, they have been declining as a proportion of the total economy for 50, 60 years. And that's true of Germany, which has a trade surplus and consistently runs trade surplus, just as it is of the US. And that's because technology has improved our ability to make things, and we now make more stuff but with fewer people. And you can see the analogy with farming.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As we're speaking, he hasn't really got any substantial deal through, and he's had to extend the deadline until August the 1st.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's quite bewildering. So there was a very interesting anecdote about trade talks with Japan because the Japanese would go to the trade talks and say, what would you like? And the Americans would say, what do you got to offer us? And they'd say, well, what are you complaining about? And they complained about two things. One was a supposed 70% Japanese tariff on rice, which doesn't exist. And another was one that Trump has mentioned several times, which is a bowling ball test that the Japanese have some test that if you drop a bowling ball on a car and it dents the hood, then you can't admit the car. That doesn't exist either. So they were being asked to get rid of barriers to trade, which didn't exist. So it made negotiating with the Trump administration extremely difficult, which is another reason why, of course, we haven't had all the deals that he'd promised. He was going to get 90 deals in 90 days.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In trade. China does manage its currency to keep its currency undervalued. It does exclude foreign goods and has rules that mean that if you try and set up with a partner in China, you can lose your intellectual property. So there might be an argument for saying, let's pick on China. But if you go back to April the 2nd, he picked on every single country. So rather than create an allies against China, he alienated pretty much everyone. And before that, of course, he put tariffs on Canada and Mexico for non trade related reasons, for to do with immigration and fentanyl imports, ridiculously so in the case of Canada. And so it's just such a chaotic scattergun policy where he is alienating allies more than he is confronting his enemies.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he definitely has an anti-globalization policy. He uses globalist as an insult. It's often used as an anti-Semitic slur in the past, by the way. First of all, it is based on a misunderstanding of how the economy currently works. Yes, it is quite globalized, and it means that companies have supply chains all over the world. So to go back to the tariffs, 45% of the stuff that the US imports is components and raw materials that are used to make US goods. So every time you tariff, you are increasing the costs of your domestic producers and you're making your own goods, therefore less competitive in global markets and more expensive for consumers. That's the first point. Secondly, in terms of what he's done, there was an argument, and the Biden administration did it as well, to say that China is not playing”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they would have to pass the costs on to consumers. And in pharmaceuticals, that's a big price that will either be paid by US consumers in the drugstores or through their insurance companies. And China, for example, exports a lot of pharmaceuticals like paracetamol, painkillers to the US. So that's a big potential cost. So we can see that it's not largely paid by the exporting country. It largely falls on the domestic economy.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Consumers. And there's a very good example in what Trump proposed on July the 8th, which was pharmaceutical tariffs of two hundred percent. So let's just walk through what that might mean. So if you have an item that costs $50, the tariff on that would be $100. So the importer who normally pays $50 would have to pay an extra tax of $100, make it $150 in all. Now, he can't go back to the supplier in China or Japan, say, well, I'm sorry, you're going to have to lower your price by $100 because it only costs $50 in the first place. They'd have to give him the item for free and give him $50 on top. And similarly, if a company that's importing it, they may, you know, sell it on, they may have a big profit margin, they sell it on, they're unlikely to have that big a profit margin, another hundred dollars on top of the 50 and sell it for like $160, that they can absorb all the costs themselves.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A tariff is a tax. So we could call this the Trump tax. I do that a few times in the book. And then it's a new tax. It's quite a high tax. But who pays? Who formally pays the tariff is the company that imports the goods. Now, there's another economic concept called the incidence of the tariff. Now, the incidence of the tariff might be different. So Trump's argument is that he's setting up an external revenue service and its foreign countries that pay the tariffs, not domestic businesses. So there are two ways of looking at that. First of all, you can look at history. So Trump set up some tariffs in his first administration on steel and aluminium. And those weren't really paid by the exporting countries. They largely fell on businesses and consumers. Most economic studies seem to suggest that they end up the bulk of them being end up being paid by domestic.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“every year so it's impossible to find an economist who really thinks that anything about this formula was sound afterwards they put in some Greek letters into the formula to say it was sophisticated and cited an economic paper the economist whose paper they cited said not only shouldn't they have cited it but they used the wrong numbers in their formula and actually the tariff should have been only a quarter as high it was actually proposed if they were genuinely using his formula”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, we're talking here about this specific formula. And as you say, it deals just with goods and not services. But services is the majority of the economy. So it's very odd to look at the smaller sector of the economy when making your economic decisions. Secondly, yes, it's looking at bilateral deficits. The deficit was at one other particular country and arguing essentially with these tariffs that the US should have a surplus with each country in the world, or at least be balanced with each country in the world. No economists think that's a good idea. And as I say, to go back to the example of Lesotho, another example might be Bangladesh, which produces cheap clothes, has a very low GDP per capita. It can't possibly buy as much of the US of what the US makes as it sends to the US. The based formula on one year only 2024. And of course, trade surpluses with countries goes up and down.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cars or trucks, or we all do that, we specialize in what we're good at, and then we earn enough income to buy from other people. And it's the same with nations. The US is a country which is very sophisticated, makes sophisticated goods, has aerospace, technology, and then it buys in cheaper goods from other countries that make them. And that's specialization is good for the US and it's good for the world.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's saying that the US has a trade deficit because other countries are cheating. It's also saying I think he famously wrote trade bad on some speech notes that somebody once found or honed in on the camera, but he has an attitude which in the 18th century would have been called mercantilist, and that is that exports are good and imports are bad. And Adam Smith demolished the idea in 1776. So you can say the policy is only 250 years out of date. And if you think of it another way, why? It's like saying going to work to earn money is good, spending money on what you need for the house is bad. You export goods so you can afford to buy imports. That's the nature of trade. And we all specialize in various things. I write books and I earn money to buy the groceries. Other people, you know, drive.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just nonsense, and there are many examples why it was nonsense, but a good one is Lesotho, which exports mostly some apparel, but a lot of diamonds to the US. The US doesn't have a natural source of diamonds. Lasoto is surrounded by South Africa. It's a very poor country. It's not going to buy the type of goods that the US sells, but the US has a great demand for the diamonds that Lesotho produces. It's natural for Lesotho to have a trade surplus with the US. And to say that it's got a trade surplus because it's being unfair or it's imposing tariffs or something is just nonsense. And all those rates, which of course went down to having tariffs on an uninhabited islands, largely populated by penguins, all of them were nonsense. In the context of that, I just thought this is so bad. This is such a terrible policy that someone ought to write a book about it.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Called it. There were suggestions that it was ball based on the sophisticated analysis of other countries' trade policies and setting the rates very specifically to allow for that any exchange rate mechanism, whatever the other countries were doing. When they look to the actual rates, it was very clear they'd use a very, very simple formula and a stupid formula, which was to divide the amount of goods exports the country made to the US by the overall trade deficit that the US had with that country. So if Rauritania exported a billion dollars worth of goods to America, it had a trade surplus of $500 million. That was deemed to be a tariff rate that Euritania was imposing a 50%. And then Trump said, oh, well, being generous, we'll cut that in half and call it 25%.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was immediately after the April 2nd announcement of those tariff rates, and if you recall, before the announcement of the big tariff package, liberation day, they announced. Called it in the White House Ruination Day is what my”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Financial power was huge and that a lot of experts thought to return to the gold standard would be to return to those conditions. But in the intervening Eleven years, Britain's economic position had been massively weakened by the The First World War was no longer the power it was, and going back on the gold standard at a very high rate turned out to be a mistake ushering in deflation and a general strike. Crumps nostalgia is for this era when manufacturing employees Was a large percentage The US workforce, a married man could afford a nice house, the latest car, all the gadgets, and support his family. That's what he's kind of with his Make America great again, aiming for, but that's also a mistake because you're never going to get manufacturing employment back to the levels it was in the 1950s and 60s.”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Well, a hundred years ago exactly 1925, Winston. Then the Chancellor of Exchequer, the British Finance. Put John Maynell Keynes, the great economist, thought this was a great An enormous mistake. He argued against it at the time, and he came out with a very quick book, The Economic Consequences of Mr. St. And it was indeed one of the great policy mistakes of the twentieth century, so the idea of this book, the economic consequences of Mr Trump, is to say again this was an enormous policy mistake. And I think there is another great parallel here, which is that Churchill and the Was making that decision for nostalgic reasons. Britain had been on the gold standard before nineteen fourteen, a time when its economic and”
2025-07-17 · Intelligence Squared · How will Trump’s tariff war impact the global economy? With Philip Coggan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT