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Mark Dow: Tariffs, Trade, and Trump - [Making Markets, EP.59]

·53 min·3 clips

Dow says the process, not just the policy, is destroying confidence in the United States.

Eric Golden introduces Mark Dow as a macro investor and commentator with experience at the IMF, the US Treasury, and on Wall Street. The episode opens with Making Markets' core idea that markets are about psychology and structure, not just prices. Dow and Golden use tariffs as the entry point into a wider argument about how trade policy gets sold and how it should be analyzed. They spend time on the dollar, including the offshore monetary creation channel and the idea that foreign dollar creation can flow back into the United States. Dow argues that the dollar still lacks a real substitute and that the gold market is too small to absorb the selling some critics imagine. He pushes back on narratives about a collapsing dollar. The conversation then turns to the people shaping tariff policy. Dow is openly skeptical of officials who, in his view, reverse prior positions to fit the Trump administration's needs. He contrasts that with older administrations, where he says appointees could disagree on policy without abandoning their principles. He describes Trump as a radical departure from normal Treasury-era and White House practice. He keeps returning to the same standard: do not take the public story at face value. Look at the actual tariffs, the actual problems, the actual imbalances, and the market effects they create. Canada comes up as an example of a relationship that, in his view, is being strained without a convincing economic case. The show treats that as a market question about what gets priced, what gets distorted, and what gets justified after the fact. The episode fits the show's larger mission of explaining the structure behind transactions and headlines, and it rewards listeners who want a skeptical, mechanism-first read on policy claims.

As heard by us

A hard-nosed macro conversation about tariffs, trade, and the gap between slogans and the actual problems being discussed.

Mark Dow and Eric Golden use tariffs, trade, and Trump to examine the machinery beneath market rhetoric. The discussion is strongest when it keeps circling back to what actually moves dollar demand, why the gold market is so small, and how much tariff chatter leans on anecdotes…

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Why you'd press play

If you want tariffs and the dollar translated into market mechanics, this is your lane.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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