# What Trump’s Tariffs Mean for Canned Soup

An episode of [Big Take](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1578096201), 20 Aug 2026, 21 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/UVBrz8bN8aM2Xe47PEPu/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/825d4e29-b616-46f4-afd7-ae2b0013005c/db8d6136-5ac0-49f3-afc1-b4ac015426f5/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=8b1dd624-a026-43e9-8b57-ae2b00130066

On today’s Big Take podcast, economy reporter Shawn Donnan walks David Gura through what eight years of tariffs have meant for steel mills, can manufacturers, food growers and consumers. And as the second Trump administration continues to pursue tariffs – see this week’s 11th-hour negotiations with Canada over the US’s latest proposed duties – Donnan looks at how manufacturers have tried to adapt. Read more: What the American Tin Can Reveals About Trump’s Volatile Tariff Policy We have a special Bloomberg subscription offer for podcast listeners at Bloomberg.com/podcastoffer. Hosted by David Gura; Produced by Rachael Lewis-Krisky; Reported by Shawn Donnan; Edited by Jeffrey Grocott. Fact-checking by Brunella Tipismana Urbano; Engineering by Emma Munger. Senior Producer: Naomi Shavin; Deputy Executive Producer: Julia Weaver. Executive Producer: Nicole Beemsterboer. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:02] Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
[0:08] Speaker 2: This is a can of Campbell's soup.
[0:12] Speaker 3: I brought a prop look at that. Let me have
[0:15] Speaker 3: you introduced yourself.
[0:15] Speaker 4: I'm Sean Donnan. I write about the US and global
[0:19] Speaker 4: economies from Washington. What do you have with you? A
[0:23] Speaker 4: can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup.
[0:25] Speaker 3: Campbell's chicken noodle soup.
[0:27] Speaker 4: That I bought from seven to eleven. For a few
[0:30] Speaker 4: months now, I've been obsessed with a little episode that
[0:34] Speaker 4: happened in March of twenty eighteen, when Wilbur Ross, the
[0:38] Speaker 4: then Commerce Secretary, went on TV and held up a
[0:43] Speaker 4: can of that very same soup.
[0:45] Speaker 2: Well, I just bought this can today out of seven
[0:48] Speaker 2: eleven down here, and a price was a dollar ninety nine.
[0:52] Speaker 3: This is, as you've written, Sean, a mostly forgotten footnote
[0:55] Speaker 3: of President Trump's first term. Yet, Wilbur Ross on CNBC
[0:58] Speaker 3: the day after the president and ounce what were some
[1:00] Speaker 3: of his first tariffs, twenty five percent tariffs on foreign steel.
[1:04] Speaker 3: He was out there doing some damage control.
[1:06] Speaker 4: Yeah, so the markets were having connections about terrace. So
[1:11] Speaker 4: Wilbur Ross, someone who came from Wall Street, former banker
[1:15] Speaker 4: and a billionaire he held up that can of soup
[1:17] Speaker 4: to try and say, look, guys, it's not going to
[1:20] Speaker 4: be that big a deal.
[1:21] Speaker 2: In the can of Campbell's soup, there's about two point
[1:25] Speaker 2: six cents two point six pennies worth of steel. So
[1:30] Speaker 2: if that goes up by twenty five percent, that's about
[1:34] Speaker 2: six tenths of one cent on the price of a
[1:38] Speaker 2: can of campbell soup. So who in the world is
[1:41] Speaker 2: going to be too bothered by six tenths of a cent.
[1:45] Speaker 4: It was a slightly weird episode, a billionaire holding up
[1:49] Speaker 4: a can of soup. But then there were also promises
[1:54] Speaker 4: that Wilbur Ross made that day. There's going to be
[1:57] Speaker 4: tens of thousands of jobs, there are going to be
[1:59] Speaker 4: hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, and all of
[2:02] Speaker 4: that is going to mean that these tariffs are going
[2:04] Speaker 4: to be good for the US economy.
[2:07] Speaker 3: Today, in Trump's second term, tariffs on imported steel are
[2:10] Speaker 3: twice what they were back then fifty percent. And since
[2:13] Speaker 3: last year is sweeping AEPA tariffs we're struck down by
[2:16] Speaker 3: the Supreme Court, the administration has taken another run at
[2:19] Speaker 3: building up the US's tariff wall using Section three oh
[2:22] Speaker 3: one of the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four.
[2:25] Speaker 4: So tariffs are a tool and a threat that this
[2:27] Speaker 4: administration keeps using. Just this week, we've got this fifty
[2:30] Speaker 4: percent tariff that President Trump had threatened on Canadian goods,
[2:34] Speaker 4: including hockey sticks, that has prompted negotiations. We may or
[2:37] Speaker 4: we may not get a deal that may or may
[2:40] Speaker 4: not lower some tariffs. We're waiting to see how that
[2:44] Speaker 4: turns out. But we are eight years really into this
[2:47] Speaker 4: tariff experiment in the US economy, and we're at a
[2:51] Speaker 4: point now where we can start to really kind of
[2:54] Speaker 4: figure out what has actually happened. Right, Well, that can
[2:58] Speaker 4: of chicken noodles, so that Wilbur brought for a dollar
[3:02] Speaker 4: ninety nine, I went out to my local seven to
[3:04] Speaker 4: eleven and it cost me three forty nine. Okay, so
[3:07] Speaker 4: that's gone up. And so I was trying to figure out, well, okay,
[3:11] Speaker 4: so what actually happened to the tin can? Was this
[3:14] Speaker 4: good for the tin can industry.
[3:21] Speaker 3: I'm David Gera and this is the big take from
[3:23] Speaker 3: Bloomberg News.
[3:24] Speaker 4: Today.
[3:24] Speaker 3: On the show, we unpack how tariffs on tinplate steel
[3:28] Speaker 3: reverberated from the White House to a steel town in
[3:30] Speaker 3: West Virginia to a multi generational tomato farm in Indiana.
[3:35] Speaker 3: Plus how those tariffs raised would consumers pay for canned
[3:38] Speaker 3: food without lifting the steel industry.
[3:46] Speaker 5: I don't know if you want to put this on
[3:47] Speaker 5: a podcast, I'd always say this, the can itself is
[3:50] Speaker 5: not a sexy package.
[3:53] Speaker 3: Robert Gatz is the vice president and general manager at
[3:56] Speaker 3: Can Corporation of America.
[3:58] Speaker 1: But there is still value in the can.
[4:02] Speaker 3: In its plant outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Can Corp. Produces
[4:06] Speaker 3: almost a billion tin cans a year. Robert is pretty
[4:10] Speaker 3: used to people taking cans for granted, but he says
[4:12] Speaker 3: that for food security and in times of crisis, you've
[4:15] Speaker 3: got to have canned foods.
[4:17] Speaker 5: Inventories need to be at a certain level. If you
[4:20] Speaker 5: think back to COVID timeframe, you go into the grocery
[4:23] Speaker 5: store during COVID, everything was gone, and what were the
[4:26] Speaker 5: first two things gone?
[4:28] Speaker 1: Toilet paper and can goods.
[4:32] Speaker 3: Sean, you effectively did an in depth fact check of
[4:35] Speaker 3: what Wilbur Ross said on television. You interrogated this kind
[4:38] Speaker 3: of core belief that these tariffs could create manufacturing jobs
[4:42] Speaker 3: while raising prices only imperceptibly. And to do that, you
[4:46] Speaker 3: started with the makers of the cans themselves, like can Corp.
[4:49] Speaker 3: And you know, these tend to be regional operations.
[4:52] Speaker 4: Why is that if you are shipping unfilled tin cans,
[4:56] Speaker 4: you are basically shipping air and that does not make
[4:59] Speaker 4: sense economically. So what you tend to see is that
[5:03] Speaker 4: can makers are spotted around the United States and they
[5:06] Speaker 4: are generally close to the canneries and the farmers who
[5:13] Speaker 4: feed fruit and vegetables into those canneries, so that you're
[5:17] Speaker 4: not shipping empty cans too far. It makes sense to
[5:23] Speaker 4: ship a coil of steel that has a huge amount
[5:26] Speaker 4: of value in it, and you can pack them into
[5:28] Speaker 4: a container, and that all makes sense. What it does
[5:31] Speaker 4: not make sense to do is to ship an empty
[5:33] Speaker 4: tin can. And Robert Gattz showed you around can Corp.
[5:36] Speaker 4: Could you describe it? Sure?
[5:38] Speaker 2: So.
[5:38] Speaker 4: The Can Corporation of America, which was created in the
[5:41] Speaker 4: nineteen seventies. The immigrant family that founded it had a
[5:47] Speaker 4: business growing mushrooms and they were fed up with the
[5:49] Speaker 4: quality of the cans that they were getting, so they
[5:52] Speaker 4: decided that they were going to set up their own
[5:54] Speaker 4: can company. There's three hundred and fifty or so employees
[5:58] Speaker 4: and what you see is these enormous coils of steel
[6:03] Speaker 4: that come in and they go through this amazing production
[6:07] Speaker 4: process where they first get turned into tubes and then
[6:10] Speaker 4: they're inserting wrinkles in the tubes, those kind of wavelets
[6:13] Speaker 4: that you see in the side of a tin can
[6:15] Speaker 4: that give it kind of structure and firmness. They're putting
[6:18] Speaker 4: coatings on it depending on what's going to go inside.
[6:21] Speaker 4: Those billion cans that they turn out a year come
[6:24] Speaker 4: in two hundred different sizes, but it all starts with
[6:28] Speaker 4: that cost of steel and those steel coils that come in.
[6:31] Speaker 4: And when I was there, there were coils of steel
[6:34] Speaker 4: from Germany next to coils of steel from Ohio, all
[6:37] Speaker 4: coming together in this factory in Swing State, Pennsylvania.
[6:41] Speaker 3: You've written that this is a specific kind of steel.
[6:44] Speaker 3: It's tinplate. It's steel rolled out with a thin layer
[6:47] Speaker 3: of food safe tin. Half can makers like can Corp
[6:51] Speaker 3: traditionally sorts this from the US or have they been
[6:54] Speaker 3: getting it from overseas.
[6:55] Speaker 4: So if you want to talk about tinplate and tin cans,
[6:58] Speaker 4: we can go all the way back to Alexander Hamilton,
[7:00] Speaker 4: and he identified the production of tinplate as a national priority.
[7:04] Speaker 4: You go up to the McKinley or the McKinley tariffs
[7:07] Speaker 4: of eighteen ninety were largely about tin plate, about protecting
[7:11] Speaker 4: the industry in the United States, and you have the
[7:14] Speaker 4: growth of some great, big blast furnaces here in the
[7:19] Speaker 4: US on the back of that. In today's world, tinplate
[7:23] Speaker 4: is actually a tiny part of the steel market. Steel
[7:27] Speaker 4: makers get much more of their profits and their revenues
[7:32] Speaker 4: from making steel for the auto industry or for construction,
[7:36] Speaker 4: and the consumption of tin plate in the United States
[7:40] Speaker 4: is only around one percent of the total market. And
[7:44] Speaker 4: that gets to be kind of very important as you
[7:47] Speaker 4: think about tariffs. What it makes sense to put tariffs on,
[7:51] Speaker 4: what it makes sense for big industries to invest in.
[7:54] Speaker 3: I wonder, Sean if imposing these tariffs did help encourage
[7:58] Speaker 3: domestic production of the kind of steel in any way.
[8:02] Speaker 4: So the answer is it did not. On the day
[8:05] Speaker 4: that Wilbur Ross went on TV, there were a dozen
[8:09] Speaker 4: steel mills in the United States that were turning out tinplate.
[8:14] Speaker 4: Can makers imported roughly fifty percent of the steel that
[8:18] Speaker 4: they used to make cans in America. Today, there are
[8:23] Speaker 4: three active steel mills in the United States that turn
[8:27] Speaker 4: out tinplate and can makers will tell you that they
[8:30] Speaker 4: import eighty percent of the steel that they use to
[8:33] Speaker 4: make tin cans sewn.
[8:35] Speaker 3: So there's this paradox. It seems you have tariffs put
[8:38] Speaker 3: in place supposedly to create an incentive to make US
[8:41] Speaker 3: producers of things like tinplate more competitive with foreign suppliers.
[8:45] Speaker 3: Why aren't US manufacturers jumping back into the tin plate
[8:49] Speaker 3: manufacturing business.
[8:51] Speaker 4: A lot of foreign producers have become just better at
[8:54] Speaker 4: producing tinplate, They've invested more in it, they have more
[8:57] Speaker 4: modern steel mills, and there's been a very clear decision
[9:03] Speaker 4: by the steel industry not to invest in tinplate production. Now,
[9:07] Speaker 4: they will tell you that that is partly because of
[9:11] Speaker 4: foreign competition and that they have in the past sought
[9:15] Speaker 4: higher tariffs still unimported tinplate. But people in the industry
[9:20] Speaker 4: will also say, well, yeah, that's true. But part of
[9:22] Speaker 4: the story here is also decades of under investment and
[9:26] Speaker 4: a lot of these steel mills, which means that they
[9:28] Speaker 4: just aren't competitive at turning out tin plate, and tinplate
[9:32] Speaker 4: is a tiny part of the market. You know, why
[9:35] Speaker 4: would we allocate a lot of capital to that.
[9:37] Speaker 3: You steered your car from outside of Allentown to West
[9:41] Speaker 3: Virginia to a now shuttered mill to go to one
[9:45] Speaker 3: of these mill towns where historically they've produced this tinplate steel,
[9:48] Speaker 3: and they told you making tin plate is not worth
[9:51] Speaker 3: the investment, even with these new tariff protections. What was
[9:54] Speaker 3: the situation there.
[9:56] Speaker 4: Yeah, So we'red in West Virginia, which is really only
[10:01] Speaker 4: about half an hour forty minutes from Pittsburgh, is a
[10:04] Speaker 4: town that was literally created around a steel mill. A
[10:08] Speaker 4: guy called Ernest Weir moved there in the early twentieth
[10:11] Speaker 4: century set up this mill, and at one point in
[10:14] Speaker 4: the twentieth century this was one of the largest, if
[10:17] Speaker 4: not the largest, tinplate mill in the United States. They
[10:21] Speaker 4: did all sorts of other steel there as well, but
[10:23] Speaker 4: tinplate was a big part of it. That Campbell's Soup can.
[10:26] Speaker 4: The steel for it used to come from Weirdon, among
[10:29] Speaker 4: other places. At one point in the early seventies, fourteen
[10:32] Speaker 4: thousand people worked in the weird And Steel mill. In
[10:35] Speaker 4: twenty twenty four, Cleveland Cliffs, the current owners shut down
[10:39] Speaker 4: the tin mill there. The head of the United steel
[10:42] Speaker 4: Workers local there said he thought it needed about three
[10:44] Speaker 4: hundred million dollars in investment just to get back up
[10:48] Speaker 4: and running and be competitive. And that was the last
[10:53] Speaker 4: part of the mill to be shut down, and more
[10:55] Speaker 4: than nine hundred people lost their jobs, and as a result,
[10:58] Speaker 4: America lost what had been a pretty big domestic producer.
[11:03] Speaker 4: And you know, nine hundred jobs doesn't feel like a
[11:06] Speaker 4: lot when you're looking at the aggregate numbers for the
[11:08] Speaker 4: US economy. Put in a small town in West Virginia,
[11:12] Speaker 4: when that company that employs US nine hundred people is
[11:17] Speaker 4: the largest taxpayer in the community, when pretty much everyone
[11:21] Speaker 4: you talk to has either worked in the mill or
[11:24] Speaker 4: had a relative who worked in the mill going back
[11:27] Speaker 4: for more than a century, it means losing your main
[11:31] Speaker 4: economic engine but also a huge player in your community
[11:42] Speaker 4: after the break.
[11:43] Speaker 3: What tinplate tariffs mean for farmers, for canners and consumers,
[11:47] Speaker 3: and for the Trump administration.
[12:01] Speaker 1: I call it three different waves.
[12:02] Speaker 3: Back at can Corp, which relies increasingly on imported tinplate,
[12:07] Speaker 3: Robert Gatz watched as tariffs made imported steel more expensive.
[12:11] Speaker 5: So there was a first wave of twenty five percent,
[12:14] Speaker 5: and then there was also AEPA tariffs, And in the
[12:16] Speaker 5: additional twenty five percent tariffs, that's where everything really started
[12:20] Speaker 5: to get very tough. As far as your conversations with customers.
[12:24] Speaker 3: Roberts says, can makers traditionally lock in their steel prices
[12:27] Speaker 3: on one year contracts, and at the end of a
[12:30] Speaker 3: year they tell their own customers what their empty cans
[12:33] Speaker 3: will cost in the coming year.
[12:35] Speaker 5: But with that last year in twenty twenty five, we
[12:38] Speaker 5: actually had to go back and do two different price
[12:40] Speaker 5: increases to our customers because of those tariff impacts, which
[12:44] Speaker 5: actually happened immediate.
[12:48] Speaker 3: Sean you looked at how tariffs on imported steel got
[12:51] Speaker 3: passed down to Cancorp's customers starting with this three generation
[12:54] Speaker 3: family farm in Indiana.
[12:56] Speaker 4: What did you learn? So if you talk to Glenn Abbott,
[13:00] Speaker 4: who is the current farmer in charge of Abbot Farms,
[13:03] Speaker 4: it was set up by his father in the nineteen sixties,
[13:06] Speaker 4: he will tell you that one of the best decisions
[13:09] Speaker 4: his dad ever made was in nineteen eighty two to
[13:12] Speaker 4: start growing tomatoes and sell them to canaries. And the
[13:19] Speaker 4: reason for that is in the kind of unpredictable world
[13:23] Speaker 4: that farmers inhabit, tomatoes and selling them under contract to
[13:29] Speaker 4: a cannery is a steady source of income. You know
[13:32] Speaker 4: what you're going to get paid This year they are
[13:35] Speaker 4: planting four hundred and sixty five or they have planted
[13:37] Speaker 4: four hundred and sixty five acres of tomatoes. That's less
[13:42] Speaker 4: than ten percent of the eight thousand acres that they
[13:45] Speaker 4: have at the farm. There that will generate forty percent
[13:48] Speaker 4: of their revenues.
[13:49] Speaker 3: The family sells to a canner called Red Gold, which
[13:52] Speaker 3: recently started buying fewer of the Abbot's tomatoes. Why is that.
[13:56] Speaker 4: Red Gold is paying more for cans today seventeen percent
[14:01] Speaker 4: more for cans today than it was last year, and
[14:04] Speaker 4: as a result it's had to adjust. It also is
[14:08] Speaker 4: facing increasing competition from overseas producers. One of the quirks
[14:14] Speaker 4: in the current tariff regime is that tinplate has fifty
[14:18] Speaker 4: percent tariff on it, But if that tinplate is in
[14:20] Speaker 4: a can that is already filled with peaches or tomatoes
[14:24] Speaker 4: or beans that comes in from China or Europe or
[14:28] Speaker 4: North Africa, it is not subject to the same tariffs,
[14:35] Speaker 4: and therefore that steel is coming in essentially duty free,
[14:39] Speaker 4: and that creates competition for the domestic supply chain. In
[14:43] Speaker 4: terms of cans. The consequence for Glenn Abbott is that
[14:46] Speaker 4: he is growing ten fewer acres of tomatoes than he
[14:50] Speaker 4: was last year. They're sitting at roughly four hundred and
[14:53] Speaker 4: sixty five acres of tomatoes, which is significantly below the
[14:57] Speaker 4: six hundred acres that he really need needs to grow
[15:00] Speaker 4: to really fully maximize revenues.
[15:03] Speaker 3: Can Corp. And others in the supply chain have looked
[15:05] Speaker 3: to the White House for some relief, Sean, how's that gone.
[15:08] Speaker 4: So they have spent a lot of time visiting Washington
[15:13] Speaker 4: making their case, and what you hear over and over again,
[15:17] Speaker 4: so they've gotten a lot of sympathy, but they've gotten
[15:19] Speaker 4: absolutely no relief. So they've kind of given up on
[15:22] Speaker 4: the idea that this fifty percent tariff on imported tinplate
[15:27] Speaker 4: and the higher costs that are associated with that are
[15:29] Speaker 4: going to go away. And what they've done is what
[15:31] Speaker 4: a lot of industries who face tariffs do. They've turned
[15:35] Speaker 4: their case against tariffs into one now for new tariffs.
[15:40] Speaker 3: So Sean, the producers effectively want to add the steel
[15:43] Speaker 3: tariffs to the imported canned foods that are undercutting their
[15:46] Speaker 3: own products, which would add more price pressure for people
[15:49] Speaker 3: buying canned foods. Your reporting show that canned food prices
[15:53] Speaker 3: have been outstripping food prices in general, with canned foods
[15:57] Speaker 3: up nearly fifty percent since March of twenty eighteen, and
[15:59] Speaker 3: that's pared to about thirty four percent for all food
[16:02] Speaker 3: in the home.
[16:03] Speaker 4: Yeah, the price of that can, of an empty can
[16:06] Speaker 4: is up almost eighty percent since twenty eighteen, and we
[16:10] Speaker 4: see it very clearly on the supermarket shelves in terms
[16:14] Speaker 4: of higher prices for can goods, you know, which also
[16:19] Speaker 4: affects a lot of lower income families who are more
[16:22] Speaker 4: reliant on canned foods, which are typically cheaper than fresh foods,
[16:28] Speaker 4: and see their bills go up as a result of it. Now,
[16:32] Speaker 4: we reached out to the White House and Kush Desai,
[16:35] Speaker 4: who was a spokesman for the president, says, well, you
[16:39] Speaker 4: can't blame the tariffs. This is all about Biden administration
[16:42] Speaker 4: and inflation that we inherited. And there's some truth to that.
[16:46] Speaker 4: You know, the vegetables are more expensive, everything's more expensive,
[16:49] Speaker 4: we know that. But the price of canned foods has
[16:52] Speaker 4: gone up significantly more than the price of all other foods.
[16:56] Speaker 4: And economists are pretty clear and pointing to that discrepancy
[16:59] Speaker 4: and say there's one big reason for that, and that's
[17:03] Speaker 4: the steel tariffs.
[17:05] Speaker 3: Is there any indication that Preston Trump and his White
[17:08] Speaker 3: House are adjusting course based on feedback they've gotten from
[17:14] Speaker 3: the last eight years of tariffs.
[17:16] Speaker 4: I think it's really important to remember the initial promise
[17:19] Speaker 4: that was attached to tariffs, and that was factory jobs. Essentially,
[17:24] Speaker 4: the whole case for the tariffs was built on the
[17:28] Speaker 4: the industrialization that we saw in a lot of towns
[17:32] Speaker 4: and industrial cities in America. It was built on this
[17:36] Speaker 4: idea of the China shock, that China's entry into the
[17:40] Speaker 4: global markets have essentially devastated the US manufacturing industry, and
[17:43] Speaker 4: the tariffs would help rebuild industry. People do not like
[17:47] Speaker 4: these tariffs, poll after Pole tells us because they associate
[17:51] Speaker 4: them with higher prices. But if there's a trade off
[17:55] Speaker 4: and the payoff is more factory jobs, then I think
[17:58] Speaker 4: a lot of people, and polls show this well, kind
[18:01] Speaker 4: of buy into that idea. We're willing to pay a
[18:03] Speaker 4: little bit more if that means more Americans working in
[18:06] Speaker 4: more American factories. But you don't have that yet. We
[18:10] Speaker 4: have seen investment in some mills in new production, but
[18:15] Speaker 4: what we haven't seen is a lot of jobs. They
[18:17] Speaker 4: are about thirteen hundred more people working in US steel
[18:21] Speaker 4: mills today than we're in twenty eighteen. That's in a
[18:25] Speaker 4: labor market of one hundred and seventy million people here
[18:27] Speaker 4: in the United States. And in fact, since President Trump
[18:31] Speaker 4: returned to the White House in January of twenty twenty five,
[18:34] Speaker 4: the US has lost seventy five thousand manufacturing jobs. And
[18:39] Speaker 4: so the big promise of bringing back factory jobs to
[18:44] Speaker 4: America so far is an unfulfilled promise. You know, the
[18:49] Speaker 4: White House will tell you it's too early. They will
[18:52] Speaker 4: point to other numbers like industrial production numbers, manufacturing hours worked,
[18:57] Speaker 4: and things like that that show that there's more going
[19:00] Speaker 4: going on and the factories that we have.
[19:02] Speaker 3: And you did find a bit of a silver lining
[19:04] Speaker 3: in that West Virginia milltown where nine hundred people found
[19:07] Speaker 3: themselves out of work when that mill shut down.
[19:09] Speaker 4: Yeah, there is a new kind of economic engine in town,
[19:12] Speaker 4: and that's a battery startup called form Energy, and they
[19:16] Speaker 4: now employ four hundred people. They have a factory that
[19:19] Speaker 4: turns out these big batteries that are for use by
[19:23] Speaker 4: utilities and data centers and so on. And there's a
[19:27] Speaker 4: lot of people who were laid off from the steel
[19:30] Speaker 4: mill who now work at form Energy, and that could
[19:33] Speaker 4: be a future path. But when you talk to Dean Harris,
[19:36] Speaker 4: the mayor, who himself worked for forty eight years in
[19:39] Speaker 4: the Weird and Steel mill, he will tell you that,
[19:42] Speaker 4: you know, steel is what got us here, but it's
[19:45] Speaker 4: not our future.
[19:48] Speaker 3: You got Wilbur Ross on the phone this summer. Asked
[19:52] Speaker 3: him about that that moment back in twenty eighteen and
[19:54] Speaker 3: about how he's watched the presence terrace policies unfold.
[20:00] Speaker 4: Tell you he was down in Palm Beach. He is
[20:03] Speaker 4: retired now. He believes that a lot of what we've
[20:08] Speaker 4: seen play out as a result of other things that
[20:10] Speaker 4: have gone on in the economy. He pointed to inflation
[20:13] Speaker 4: and so on as reasons why the cost of cans
[20:17] Speaker 4: had gone up more than he predicted. But he also
[20:21] Speaker 4: had this kind of I think it's the closest I've
[20:25] Speaker 4: heard to a kind of contrite statement from anyone who's
[20:30] Speaker 4: served in the Trump administration about tariffs. He said, quote,
[20:35] Speaker 4: one thing it proves is that tariffs don't necessarily solve
[20:38] Speaker 4: every problem the world has, and that I think will
[20:43] Speaker 4: always be true.
[20:50] Speaker 3: This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David
[20:52] Speaker 3: Geratt to get more from the Big Take and unlimited
[20:55] Speaker 3: access to all of bloomberg dot com. Subscribe today at
[20:57] Speaker 3: Bloomberg dot com slash podcast. If you liked this episode,
[21:02] Speaker 3: make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever
[21:04] Speaker 3: you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show.
[21:06] Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.