You're listening to Strictly Business Podcast with Lindsay Williams.
It's Monday, so it's time for Shapiro World with David Shapiro from Sassfin
Securities in Johannesburg.
But he's in New York, of course.
It's that time of year where he gets away and tests the pulse of US society,
both economic and social.
Now, David, you've obviously done a little bit of informal research, as only you can.
You speak to the chap that gives you an orange juice and a bagel in the morning.
to Iran and everything.
What is the mood amongst average Joe?
Very angry.
People are, Trump has lost his credibility.
I know that's a very bold statement for me to make,
but people don't believe him anymore.
You know, when he stands in front of the Air Force One, goes into, you know, all of
a sudden now you're...
The images that we're seeing is he talks to journalists flying around, wherever he
is flying around.
That's where they interview him.
And he comes out and comes out with these views that everything's under control and
they're making so much
money.
But no one believes him.
They don't believe Lutnik anymore and they don't believe Bissent anymore, who's the
Secretary of Treasury.
And what makes you, why I make the statement?
is how the market actually crashed after last Wednesday.
You know, and the one thing that...
I'm in the camp, I like the markets.
I like the markets, to me, are always an indicator of sentiment.
And, Lindsay, you know, it's bipartisan.
In other words, it's not
Democrats versus Republicans or the British versus the...
It's everybody.
You know, everybody's got to vote.
And they all come together in the market, and that tells you what people think.
And I think the fact that this market crashed after Trump's announcement just
showed you how they believed in it or how they
understood what it will do to the global economy.
I think over and above that, and I'm going to bring Musk in at this point,
the fact that his Tesla shares have collapsed just shows that he's now running
a it's a
brand that has lost its appeal.
You know, it's a broken brand and nobody wants to buy Tesla.
No one wants to be associated with him.
And he's kind of shriveled out of Washington.
You don't see him anymore.
But I think at the moment, even though the S&P is up a little bit here,
there's a bit of a reaction because there's views now as we talk that Trump's
going to delay
imposing tariffs for 90 days or so on.
I haven't seen the full news.
But I mean, it just shows you how fast the markets have turned around, you know, on
this.
So whether he's blinked or not, we're not sure.
But the point that I'm bringing across is that no one's going to believe him
anymore.
You know what I mean?
No one that, you know, you know, that bravado that he had when he was elected,
the bravado when he had when he gave his inauguration speech, all those phenomenal,
great.
I think people are tired of that.
And, uh.
I think if they had an election today around the country, I think you'd see a
very different result coming out.
I think people have just had enough of him and don't quite trust where he's taking
America.
Or put it in another way, they don't like the America that he's shaping.
So that's from my understanding here.
I'm in New York.
New York's a blue state.
It's a democratic state.
But the people, this is not what...
they want.
They want to be who they used to be, a country that everybody looked upon,
that held up in high esteem, a world leader.
They still want to be that, although they do recognize that certain things might
have been unfair in the past.
We can discuss that.
But, Lindsay, there's another point as well.
I'm in Manhattan.
I'm in the heart of New York.
Yes.
And funny enough, one of the roads that run past where I stay is Broadway.
And one of the problems is that they've already picked up the
anti-American feeling.
You know, fewer Canadians are coming to America.
So a huge amount of tourists come.
It's very early days, you know, because this has only been going on for a short
time.
So fewer Canadians are coming in.
They've noticed that.
that Europeans are also cancelling some of their trips.
It might not be evident yet, and it might only be a small percentage, but Manhattan
relies on it.
They rely on those tourists.
It comes in summer.
These are the tourists who kind of crowd around Fifth Avenue, or they're in Central
Park.
They're riding on those carriages, and they're going to Broadway.
They're eating in the restaurants.
They're going to the Carnegie Deli or the Carnegie...
diner as it's now called and so on.
So it's very important for them.
Broadway is exceptionally important for tourists.
They rely on the tourists.
People come here from even out of America just to see shows.
So I think that's a big concern.
There's a concern that people by choice will not want to buy American goods and
will not want to come
and visit America as long as Trump.
has adopted this attitude you know you've raped you've pillaged us you've what you
know all the all the other views that he
that he has you've ripped us off so um you know that that that's my my understanding
from
just talking to people around here watching them watching the local news
which i love you know um new
york one which is um one of the channels that i watch carefully so it's it's not a
happy place
okay I, as you're one of the few people that know that I had quite a bit of time
on my hands
last week lying around in bed.
And one of the things I had attached to me was a load of electrodes and people were
monitoring various
functions, notably my heart.
And I was sitting there and I had my, I was sitting there with my notepad and I
started thinking about Trump.
And I just thought, this is one man.
Nobody else came up with this crap that he's come up with.
about this formula.
I mean, the formula was like baby stuff.
It was like primary school stuff.
And we take this and we take this and then we divide it by two.
And that's your tariff rate.
I mean, it was seriously embarrassing.
But this man, he says he wants to make America great again.
He wants to make every American wealthy.
No, he doesn't.
He doesn't care about America.
He doesn't care about Americans.
He doesn't care about his family even.
He cares about one thing, and that's Donald
Trump. And everything he does is designed to make him look good because of his
desperate, desperate insecurity.
Because he is, and I think he even recognises, when he goes to bed at night,
that he is the most spectacularly mediocre human being that's ever been in the White
House.
And not just ever been in the White House, that's ever, you know, tried to get into
the White House or held public office.
He is the most horrible, horrible, loathsome specimen that I can ever
remember.
I don't hate people.
In my later years, I always said, you mustn't hate people.
That's too strong.
Just ignore them.
But you can't ignore him.
That's the thing, David.
You cannot ignore Trump.
You turn on the television and there he is making up some lies.
One of his great things is like you've never seen before, like the world's never
seen before.
And it's trillions coming in because of my tariffs.
And now, having said, and all his boot-licking toady sycophants have said,
he's not going to change his mind.
Well, he's just changed his mind, hasn't he, as we've been speaking?
We don't.
I'm still waiting.
I hope you've got the headlines there, because I've only picked it up as a banner
headline that came across my screen.
But I think there is so much pressure on him to do so from people who supported
him,
like Bill Ackman.
I'm trying to think of the other fund manager that's also gone negative on him.
They're quite a few.
Jamie Diamond has also come out this afternoon and said, this morning New York
time, has come out against it as well.
But the problem with the market is a 90-day, what's the word I'm looking for?
Delay.
There's another word.
Exponement, yeah.
Yeah.
A stay of execution.
That's the phrase.
A 90-day stay of execution.
It's not fooling the market.
And you said to me off air, people don't believe him anymore.
They're fed up with his lies.
The S&P was down 4% on the opening, within the first half hour of opening.
It then rallied as we were on air by about 3.5%.
So a 7.5% swing, it's now flat again, the futures that is.
So people are saying, okay, we were short the market, we covered half of our shorts.
But we're going to reinstate them again if it rallies anymore, because this is not
going to solve itself.
And even if you banned all tariffs now, the damage is done.
The stock market has fallen.
S&P's, sorry, NASDAQ's fallen more than 20%, so technically in a bear market.
S&P close to doing so.
That's right.
The credibility is not there to buy the market yet.
So you're right.
People just don't.
don't know what's going to come out of his mouth, you know, in the next day or so.
And as I say, Lindsay, people are getting bored of him.
You know, they're tired of him.
They're tired of the, they heard it for four years and they thought things might
change.
In fact, it's become worse.
And, you know, the adjectives that he uses, his invictive that he uses, you
know, is that the right word?
You know, he's vicious.
And I think just people want him to go away.
kind of thing or whatever it is.
Just say, you know, they want responsible managers.
They don't want showmen.
They don't want someone insulting their neighbours and insulting their allies or
their
friends.
So, you know, yes, he might have those fringe supporters who live in caves
somewhere in Tennessee or,
I don't know, Montana.
I don't know.
You know, those chaps who come out in bearskins and they've got big knives.
You know, but I think...
Brian Lodge, the East Coast, West Coast, the Chicago's, I think, I believe have had
enough.
And the way that he doesn't listen to people, you know,
it's whether it's Larry Summers, whether it's Warren Buffett, whether it's The
Economist, The Wall Street Journal,
Bloomberg, you name it, everybody has been scathing about his imposition of these
tariffs and the fact
that he doesn't listen to anybody.
Even Scott Besant.
wasn't there when they came up with these calculations.
No one can understand how they got to these levels.
And it's, you know, to go back to Ricardian, what's it,
Ricardo's views, you know, that you should have reciprocal, you know, there should be
balance between.
But he was from a different age.
You know, in other words, if I buy from you, you buy from me, and it evens itself
out.
Well, you can't do that.
And, Lindsay, the story,
one of the funniest stories or sad story is Lesotho.
You know where Lesotho is.
It's used to be called Basotho Land.
The people there, it's a very high, it's in the Drakensberg.
It can be very cold.
But what's happened is that factories have opened there where they make Levi jeans,
and I think they make Calvin Klein clothing as well.
So you're supporting a very…
poor population the last thing that those people can do and admittedly there might
be some something
sinister because probably those factories are owned by chinese or proxies of the
chinese you know because they
get around quotas by by moving their factories to other lands but
i mean still at the end of the day and that's what i'm saying at the end of the
day you're supplying you're giving work
to this poor nation whatever it is So whether it's owned by Chinese, whoever it
is, yes, okay,
come down around the table, sell those factories to Americans, but whatever, I
don't know.
But that's the kind of outcomes that you're going to have where
nations like Mauritius, like Lesotho, so on,
are going to be absolutely decimated by these policies.
And they're not going to be first in line to negotiate.
So I just think a lot more thought should have been applied and say, look,
this is what we're going to do.
You know, this is what we're going to do.
This is what we intend to.
It's not fair, but let's negotiate this.
But he's not that kind of person.
He's not.
I guess where he was on the weekend.
Well, I know what happened over the weekend.
This was a real kick in the teeth for the average American because he's playing golf
in Estinia's tournament.
And, um...
This was when people had had time to reflect on Thursdays and Fridays, very
sinister action, because I thought Thursday,
that was it.
It was going to be a quick washout, you know, 5, 6 percent on all the major
indices.
And I thought it can't happen again on the Friday.
But goodness me, it did.
And more in some cases.
And so the market closed on Friday.
Saturday, he plays his golf and he goes through to the next round of the seniors
tournament.
And then there's a White House.
Communique comes out and you think, oh, he's going to say something about the
stock market and, you know.
I know.
But no, it said, we're pleased to announce that Mr.
Trump won his round and went into the next round and said, just spoke about the Gulf.
And it was really sarcastic and nasty, I thought.
Yeah.
And golf is an elitist sport.
Not everybody can.
I find that so insulting.
And there's already, you know who one of the most popular figures around us is
Bernie Sanders.
Yes, he did a tap on the other night and they loved him.
They love him because he's walking around that Trump is basically supporting
billionaires.
And he's referring to the inauguration where you had all the tech billionaires
around there.
And you've got Elon Musk and so on.
So he's gaining a lot of support as well, for whatever reason, around, you know,
around his views, because he's deeply socialist, you know, he's deeply left.
He's bordering on Marxist, actually.
Oh, well.
He's an independent, you know, but I mean… He's a decent fellow, though.
He means well, I think.
But you don't do that.
You know, you want to play golf, you don't go put out at a time where people are
losing their… Lindsay, $5 trillion.
S&P 500 companies have lost over $5 trillion of worth.
If we add on today, because we're back in negative territory, you're going to get
this volatility.
Look at that.
It was 3.5% up, now 1.6% down.
This is astonishing volatility, David.
I don't know what the VIX has done.
It's probably gone into the 40s, 50s.
But it's unbelievable.
Musk is an interesting case point because he's obviously been banished.
He didn't go to the ridiculous Liberation Day speech where he held up that cardboard
thing.
What was that?
Why couldn't he get a stand for it?
And a pointer and say, right, there we go, that's it.
He had to stand there.
So undignified.
Does he not know how foolish he looks?
He's the President of the United States.
You've got millions of people that could stand around and hold it for you.
But no, you do it yourself.
It looks so awkward.
But Musk wasn't there.
And the interesting thing is that I think behind the scenes, Musk and Trump don't
always agree.
In fact, Trump said as much in an interview.
But he went to, Musk that is, flew to a right-wing political conference in Italy.
Obviously, Italy run by that right-wing woman.
What's her name?
Melania.
Melania something or other.
And he said, I really think that there should be.
zero tariffs between the European Union and the United States.
In other words, a free trade zone.
I mean, Trump must have been gnashing his super white teeth over when he heard that.
Yeah, he lost all credibility on this election up in Wisconsin for the judge of
the
Supreme Court, you know, between a liberal and a conservative.
They didn't say Democrat.
Well, the Democrats supported the liberals and the Republicans supported the
conservative.
And Trump, I mean, Musk sunk $26 million.
He was there handing out those million-dollar checks again, as he did
during the day.
And the conservative judge or the candidate got thumped,
55 to 45.
Yeah, 10 or 15 points, whatever it was, yeah.
Which is huge in terms of that area.
And, you know, all it shows is, I mean, it was a humiliating loss, and that was the
end of Musk. Yeah.
His share prices, his share, I don't know, it's down another 6%, 7%.
I haven't seen lately.
But, I mean, he's lost all his value.
No one wants to touch a Tesla share, Tesla car.
You know, there's protests around the world.
So, this is going to come back to bite him heavily.
Yeah, he might still be the world's richest person, but I think it's going to
reflect on the brand.
So, in my view, that gives you… what people think of Musk, what they think of
Trump,
what they think of his policies.
You know, there it is.
And that's why I love the market.
It's a very good gauge of people's sentiment.
And, you know, it's around that that I say Trump has lost it.
What was the high on Tesla?
Sorry to interrupt you, but I've got my Tesla price here, 228 we'll call it,
down nearly 5%.
I think it was 488, wasn't it, the high?
I'm going to give it to you now.
Last year or something.
I'll give you a, if my computer could work fast, it would be fine.
But it's, you know, it had a rally recently,
and it's given that back plus change.
It's been a huge fall.
It went into the 180s, sorry, 280s, I think.
There you are.
Where was it?
W.H.
Whitehouse Press Secretary, Caroline Leavitt, or Leavitt, or whatever her name
is.
Oh, she's a nasty little...
Terrible.
So-and-so.
Potential 90-day pause in...
Oh, oh, as fake news.
Oh, that's why.
Someone was short the market, wanted to get low.
Because there's been so much demand for that.
Okay, so that explains a complete reversal of that.
But I mean, there was hope for a second.
Then we go into Tesla.
So Tesla reached a high.
Of?
488.
262.
On a close.
I think that was like.
479, 480.
So you're right.
Okay.
Which was on the 17th of December, and it's now down at 227.
So it's virtually halved.
Well, it's more than halved if you take the intraday high, which I think was 488.
But the point is that for a stock like that.
And the interesting thing about it is it's not just because of Musk's
absurd antics with chainsaws and jumping up and down like a like a like a gibbon at
rallies with trump it's also because um chinese chinese
electric vehicles are
outstripping him when it comes to technology and affordability they've got
more gizmos more
gadgets and it costs costs less um that's the first thing the second thing is
Obviously, Tesla's,
by comparison, more expensive.
And it's an aging fleet, David.
They haven't got any new models coming through.
They haven't had any.
And the reason for that is that Musk has said, no, I want to muck about at the
White House.
And if there's no direction to Chukot, your CEO is very important, even if he's
not on the shop floor every day.
He's a talisman to the company.
Well, it's hurting the people who work for him.
It's hurting the distributors.
It's hurting everybody.
That's associated with this company.
You know, people don't want to buy Teslas.
You know, and even my daughter who works, who drives one in,
who's had one for a few years and is, you know, it's on lease, so she's giving it
back in August.
But she said, you know, she's driven past people in Boston who booed her.
There have been, you know, there has been some kind of backlash against them.
writing all over the motor cars and so on.
But I mean, you get booed if you drive a Tesla.
The interesting point I wanted to make is that, if you look at a five-year cycle,
if you look at a five-year cycle on the market, remember we bring in 2020.
So you're getting that distorted view of that huge gain that happened.
If we take it down to a four-year cycle, you're looking at...
Tesla over five, four years has done nothing.
It's now back where it was four years ago.
So the five-year gives it the COVID bounce, but I mean,
take out the COVID bounce and you're back to, you've done nothing over four years.
You're up 2%.
So it gives you an idea of how Tesla has performed and what this means to his
wealth.
I really wish I'd had my video camera about...
two weeks ago when when Tesla was starting to exert some negative influence
on on on people who didn't like Tesla owners
I I there's a street cat that comes and visits me every day and he when he wants
to leave he meows at the door and I
let him out and watch what he's up to and there's a car next door the next door
neighbor you're not allowed to park
in my street you but if you've got a residence permit You can park there for
half an hour or something.
And he's got a Tesla.
And the cat went up to the Tesla, looked at it, turned round,
lifted his tail and peed on it.
And I thought, this is a clever cat, this one.
But more seriously, there's been some horrible violence.
I think the best way you can protest against Tesla is sell the one you've got
now or don't buy the one you were planning to buy.
Yeah.
It'll tell on him.
And he's the kind of person who would get up and get a crowd reaction.
Not anymore.
I don't think.
You know, the protests that we saw around the country on Saturday, across the
country, across every state, including Washington.
50 states, yes, exactly.
There are thousands of people.
came out there.
I saw them in New York here as well.
Yes, you know, some of these are seasoned protesters, you know, who were still
around in the 60s and so on.
It doesn't matter.
Whatever it is, there are people who are very angry about what's happening, the
loss of jobs, particularly in critical agencies.
Not much thought has gone into it.
And I think that's why they're angry.
They're also angry that their prices are going to go up, you know,
from everything from buying a motor car to buying an avocado.
And it's soon to hit them.
And they haven't got that margin anymore that they used to have.
You know, it's gained.
This is a tax on the people of America.
Yes, you know, there's a promise of tax reductions coming.
In fact, those tax reductions are nothing more than extending what was to be phased
out.
So.
David, let's look at the JSC now because we've completely ignored it, but it's
entirely justifiable.
The all share and everything are doing pretty well, resources doing pretty well.
But then you look to the right hand side of my screen, you see why it's doing well,
because the RAND is an 18 month low.
In fact, it's probably approaching all time record lows in real trade.
I mean, it's done some overnight stuff in Nene Gate and things like that.
But anyway, around about 1950.
That's really bad.
It's very bad for the country.
I'm sorry.
That's a reflection of two things.
It's a reflection of Trump tariffs and what this will mean.
And also, I think, concerns about the government and national unity and the
budget and where South
Africa's economy goes.
Yeah.
So I think it's two-way.
You know, it's...
But, yeah, where is it now?
1948, 1949.
Yes, 1948, exactly.
Horrible stuff.
Okay, David, otherwise, how long are you there for?
No, I'm still here until May.
May?
We're going into Easter and Passover.
Of course, yes, yes.
I'm going up to Boston.
My daughter's in Portugal.
My kids are flying all over the place.
So I'm going up there next Sunday, on Sunday,
and I'll be there for the Easter and Passover and then come back here and
then...
back home.
So, help.
Well, good luck with that.
I wish you well over Passover.
And you'll be, what days might you not be available, David?
No, I'm always available.
All right.
In that case, we'll speak to Viv on Thursday because we haven't had that
little three-way feast of
reason for quite a while.
So, I'll book you for Thursday with Viv Govender.
Greg Shapiro is from Sasson Securities in New York, and that was Shapiro World.
The views and opinions expressed in these podcasts are those of Lindsay Williams and
various contributors and do not reflect the policy,
position, or opinion of any other agency, organization, employer,
or company associated with StrictlyBusinessPodcast.com.
Assumptions made on the analyses are not reflective of the position of any other
entity other than the speaker or the author.
And since we are critically thinking human beings, these views are always subject to
change,
revision and rethinking at any time.
Please do not hold us to them in perpetuity.