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- There's a lot of rhetoric
coming from President-elect

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Donald Trump about tariffs.

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Should investors take this seriously?

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How could they prepare?

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Should they be worried
at all about wild talk?

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- I think we're already
seen the wild talk,

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but you had four years to prepare for this

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because it's really not, you
know, we, I think we've kind

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of forgotten about it,

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and this is probably a bit more
of concentrated amounts of,

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of wild stuff than, than we had
in the first administration.

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But we, we've seen this before.

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I mean, you know, we would
get the late night tweets,

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you know, out of no place with sort

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of stream of consciousness.

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And I do believe that a
lot of that, the, the,

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the incoming president or the
former president, whatever,

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believes that a lot of times,
you know, be unpredictable

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and that's, that's a
bargaining chip of his,

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is his unpredictability.

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So I, so it's very hard to know
what needs to be discounted

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and what needs to be considered policy.

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So I don't wanna overreact
to any single one thing.

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I mean, on the other hand,
I do have to worry that,

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you know, I don't know
that it's, I don't know

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that it's necessarily helpful
to, to start antagonizing some

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of our closest allies

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and some of our neighbors, you
know, Canada has a, you know,

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if, if you want to annex Canada

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or whatever, they don't
wanna be part of the US And,

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and by the way, we, you know,
the thing we, they supply most

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of our energy so they could make our life

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pretty miserable too.

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So there's a lot, you
know, that's, I think one

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of the reasons is, is, is Trump
does not love the, the fact

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that Canada has a trade
surplus with the us but it's

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because we buy a lot of things
they need, we need from them,

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which is, which is basically
energy and raw materials

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and X in Greenland.

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You know, does that matter
too much? Probably not.

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It's, that's just, that's more,

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but I think if, again, if
I'm a foreigner looking

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to invest in the US

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or buy our debt, I have to
wonder, like, do I do, does,

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does this seem as much of
a layup as it used to be?

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- Yeah. Annexing or what is it?

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Or taking the Panama Canal
back was, I saw that yesterday.

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Yep. And then changing
Gulf of Mexico to Gulf

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of America, I saw,

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- Yeah.

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There's a whole, we could go on. Yeah.

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And, and you know, some of it is cosmetic.

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You, you know, you wanna
call it the Gulf of America.

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It doesn't really change things.

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You, you want to antagonize
Mexico to some extent

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where we have very important trade ships.

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That's a, that's a bit different story.

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And that's, you know, that's
where I think a lot of this,

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you know, I, it's, it's
impossible to know right now

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how much of the tariff talk,
how much of the other talk is

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laying out a bargaining
position be vis-a-vis

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actual policy pronouncements.

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And I think that
unpredictability is just gonna be

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something we have to live with.

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And it's very important to
remember as, as I mentioned

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before, equity investors
are notoriously terrible

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at geopolitics.

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We, we, it's just not there.

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Equity investors are really
good about things that affect

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earnings, cash flows,
sales, that kind of thing.

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They're not so good about
geopolitics watch the bond market,

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which again, you know, as
I mentioned is, is they're,

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they're hyperfocused on the cost of money

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and deficit, you know, financing deficits.

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Also watch commodity
markets, particularly oil,

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because oil is pure geopolitics.

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And so those are, those are
the things I watch for in terms

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of how I take my lead for what
markets are thinking about

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- Geopolitically.

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Really interesting lot to look out for.

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Thanks for talking us through it, Steve.

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- My pleasure. Thank you very much.

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- Thanks for watching.
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