Opposites attract.
Well, President Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zoa Mandami had a surprisingly friendly meeting last Friday.
Now Trump says they agree on more topics than he thought they would, like stopping crime and lowering prices across the Pacific.
Japan's new Prime Ministeranai Takaichi has unveiled a $135 billion stimulus package.
This package.
Will try to boost economic growth and help households cope with rising living costs due to inflation.
Joining me this morning to weigh in is Patrick L Young, chairman and founder of Exchange Invest.
Good morning, Patrick.
Thank you so much for joining us.
So first, media pundits are expressing their shock over the friendly meeting between Trump and Madati.
So what's your take on what happened in the Oval Office last Friday?
Well, certainly wasn't it fascinating altogether to see Remmy, the President of the United States of America, sit there with a fierce political opponent and exercise First Amendment rights on behalf of that opponent?
Isn't that something that we should all hope for to see to come the opportunity for free speech in the United States of America?
Interesting.
Both politicians regarded by certain camps as being quite mad, but the thing, of course, we have to bear in mind is neither is stupid as we can see from their electoral abilities.
Ultimately, what does Donald Trump want to see?
He wants to see a safe, secure New York City that builds property.
What does the manday agenda do that also crosses across in the Venn diagram of needs of New Yorkers and needs of the United States of America?
It's to try and help the middle class and the working class get back on.
To the whole possibility of living the American dream, and a lot of that is driven by their ability to access cheaper property.
So it's perhaps not surprising that we would find a meeting of minds.
Once again, President Trump surprises us, but let's face it, what is he in government to do, make deals rather than pursue political dogma.
Well, Patrick, it'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out once Mandami does actually enter office in 2026.
And shifting our focus now overseas, global investors might have some fears over Japan's economy.
So why is Japan going with the stimulus package and how do you expect it to impact the economy as well as other nations?
Well, isn't it very, very interesting?
Here we have Japan, which has now had more than a generation of effectively torpor economically.
Their government debt is through the roof and yet once again they've decided to throw more money at trying to reboot the Japanese economy.
Part of that also, of course, should be taken against the overall geopolitical situation.
The Japanese Prime Minister has lost. horns with China.
China very much angered because of her support for Taiwan.
At the same time, what we can see is this is a new Japanese administration that's going to go back to the future, as it were.
We know that she's a disciple of Abenomics.
We know that she was in the camp of the former and indeed the brightest prime minister, I think in many ways that Japan has seen.
The course of the last 20 years, she wants to move forward.
She wants to reform Japan and she's going to be bold in doing it.
And that's why we've got this stimulus package, which obviously does cause concerns for the rest of the world given Japan's government debt.
But at the same time, as long as Japanese households keep buying their Japanese yen bonds, JGBs should be safe.
The Japanese economy has a chance to grow.
And now shifting our focus on over to the UK, UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves is looking to tackle the cost of living with the new budget that includes tax hikes.
So what's going on with the budget as well as politics over in the UK?
Well, it's quite incredible.
Last year on July 4th, they elected a new British government.
An apathetic turnout at the polls, but it delivered 400 and something out of 650 seats went to the Labour Party, and yet here we are barely 18 months later, we have a zombie government on a prime minister who's completely discredited Keir Starmer, who's not going to last a full term, and he's hanging on like grim death to a completely incapable Treasury minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves.
Poor lady is totally out of.
Debt.
She's spent the course of the last month or so telling us all that taxes are going to have to increase and so on.
What is the big takeaway here actually, Remy?
Well, it's behind the scenes in the polling.
A majority of the British people have gone away from tax and spend economics.
There's a full 7 to 10% lead in people who believe in less tax and smaller government, and that spells the extinction of this Labour government even with their supermajority.
Well, now I do want to move on over to Belgium.
So, Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick is in Brussels and preparing EU leaders for trade talks.
So what are you watching for over there?
Well, look, I mean, Howard in Brussels is obviously not quite as romantic as Emily in Paris, and it's certainly got a bitter edge to it.
What's happening here is that we're just underpinning the European Union's utter irrelevance in the global economy.
They've got an agreement on steel tariffs, but they can't actually manage to pass all the laws through the remarkably juvenile and slow moving European Parliament in Brussels, let alone through the 27 national governments until next March or April.
The American government is upset.
Howard Lutnick is a bulldog for the US, for Maga for. trade and therefore he's making noises today.
He's saying you're going to have to remove a lot of your rather unbelievably precautionary laws against AI and other technology companies which, let's face it, have partly been put in place to try and protect the European economy against dynamic American firms.
And ultimately what we see here is a European Union that barely manages to touch the relevancy scale in the global market, but there's still 500 relatively wealthy people there that Howard Lutnick believes should be buying more American goods.
And finally, Patrick, before I let you go, you mentioned artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk was in Saudi Arabia last week.
He did say that humanoid robots could potentially make work optional and end poverty.
Meanwhile, Sam Altman is reportedly concerned about competition from Google.
So do you think these concerns over AI's balance sheet are warranted?
Look, first of all, Google concerns always an issue because Google has got an enormous balance sheet.
The possibility of OpenAI's balance sheet is going to be one of those fantastic 100% in hindsight things that we're going to find because chat GPT certainly won't give us a reasonable answer on it.
And then when we look at Elon Musk, well, isn't that just back to the future?
The 1950s we were all being told that via the Jetsons and things like that, no.
Nobody would be working by now, Remy, because everybody had taken our jobs.
They'd all been beautifully automated by computers, and we wouldn't have to worry about sitting here of a fine Monday morning in New York or indeed Malta in the afternoon doing any work whatsoever.
And yet humankind still seems to be working rather hard.
So maybe Elon Musk is right.
Maybe he's just being super optimistic.
Perhaps finally automation's time has come through AI.
Who knows.
Well, Patrick, we'll just have to wait and see how all of this plays out.
So thank you so much for joining us on this Monday and as always, thank you so much for sharing all of your perspectives.
