Peter Navarro, President Trump's Senior Counselor for Trade, speaks to reporters outside the White House.
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00:00I just want to make some brief remarks limited to the economic data today.
00:07This was the best negative print, as they say in the trade, for GDP I have ever seen in my life.
00:16It really should be very positive news for America.
00:20The way you calculate the gross domestic product is it's four drivers of GDP.
00:28It's consumption, investment, government spending, and what's called net exports.
00:35And when you have more imports than exports, you have a drag downward on the GDP.
00:45So you have to kind of calculate across the four components.
00:49So what happened with the numbers today is we had a fairly extraordinary surge of imports that was totally driven by the rest of the world trying to get their products in here before the tariffs took full hold.
01:09So the great news about that is that's a one-shot deal.
01:12So next time we get the data, that won't be the case at all.
01:18And, in fact, it will reverse, and that will contribute to growth.
01:22So when you strip all of that out and you strip out the volatility of inventories in the equation,
01:30we actually had about 3 percent GDP growth, which is very, very good and quite encouraging for employment.
01:37With respect to how these numbers were driven by Trump economic policy, we have a number of things going.
01:48We have, first of all, the tariffs themselves, which are driving a tremendous amount of domestic investment in.
01:56We have the increasing certainty, it's now a high probability, but the increasing certainty that we're going to pass a tax bill very quickly,
02:08which will allow for the 100 percent of expensing, not just of equipment, but also of buildings when you manufacture here in America.
02:21So that stimulates investment because it's going to be retroactive to the first of the year.
02:29So we're seeing that.
02:31And we've already had $5 trillion in pledges.
02:35So all this is coming in.
02:37And the data point, which was extraordinary, was a, I think it was a 22 percent increase, 22 percent increase in domestic investment.
02:49I mean, that is, like, huge, literally off the charts.
02:53You never see anything like that.
02:55And then consumption, the important thing to understand here for the finance types is that we distinguish between what's called soft data and hard data.
03:06So we've seen amidst the media barrage against the Trump tariffs and warnings and all of that, a slight deterioration of consumer sentiment and, to a certain extent, business sentiment.
03:23That's what we call soft data.
03:25But when you look at the hard data, all we're seeing is good, strong news.
03:31So the idea that there's a recession coming should be heavily discounted because when we take into effect that the tax cut's coming and the underlying strength of the economy, then I think all things are good.
03:50So we felt really good about that number when you fully understand it.
03:55And then that's pretty much all I've got to say about that.
04:00I'll take two questions, and then I really got to get in.
04:03So this is a good news, as you say.
04:04Why is Trump on True Social saying that it's Biden's stock market?
04:09And do you agree with this assessment that you have to get rid of the Biden overpay?
04:13There's two things going on here.
04:17We inherited a tremendously bad set of economic policies from Joe Biden.
04:27The fruit of that poison Biden tree is a series of bills, spending bills, which have drawn our debt far over a fiscal cliff.
04:42And we're trying to bring that back with the tax bill and the reorientation of spending that may occur.
04:51So we're stuck with that.
04:52But if you look at the Biden inflation problem, it certainly hasn't been fully cured, but we've made a very strong headway.
05:00For example, the bond market, the key metric there is the yield, say, on the 10-year.
05:06That's been coming down.
05:07We've cut gasoline prices down significantly.
05:11You've got a price of a barrel of oil down around in the low 60s.
05:16Biden averaged around 75.
05:19You know, the difference between 75 and 60 for the American household is like $1,000 a year in spending power.
05:27And so he didn't leave us with a very good hand.
05:32Right now, we see things improving.
05:35We see our policies being put into action, and we see very good things.
05:41All right, one more.
05:41Mr. Rao, any of these are the Boeing-China situation?
05:44Let's talk about Boeing-China, and then forgive me, I usually would stay, but the West Wing calls.
05:51We've got to think, from a policy point of view, very, very deeply about the Boeing problem in China.
06:05And the things that Americans need to better understand, a lot of them do now, is if you go back and look at the five-year industrial plans, which is how China plans its economy, they've told us for the past 20 years they intend to take over key industries from the rest of the world.
06:27And they've told us exactly how they're going to do that, which is to say that they invite foreign companies in, and then what they do is absorb and digest their technology, which is to say steal it.
06:43And once they learn how to do it, then they use their unfair trade practices to push out the American companies from world markets and eventually from China itself.
06:57So if you look at Boeing, we've seen a drop prior to this latest actions against Boeing, just since the Biden regime, we've seen a drop in their market share go from 55% down to 40% as the rise of China's domestic champion has flourished with all the unfair trade practices they give them.
07:23So the point here is that we as a country need to have Boeing's back as a country.
07:31The good news is that seemingly for every jet that China is now refusing to take, there's other countries willing to buy these things quite rapidly.
07:45All right, I'll be back later, but today I've got to go.
07:49I appreciate that.