relationships that everybody is trying to figure out their posture towards trump and no one has figured out a full-time strategy. it s very minute by minute. it s a lot like republican leaders on capitol hill. know one knows where they stand with the president. that s how he likes it. ron, let me ask you about what the french president wants to get out of this meeting. he s talking about the economic issues he s worried about, mentioning taxes. we ll talk with shannon in a bit about the looming trade war with europe. this is a fear they have as well, what s playing out with china could be happening in europe. yesterday the president threatened to put tariffs on french wine because france is threatening to put taxes on u.s. technology companies doing business there. the relationship may be more fraught. in addition to that, the president threatened to put tariffs on european and japanese autos by october, which would almost guarantee a global trade war. as it s the shg is, the actio
yesterday almost guarantee we ll go into recession. if you look at europe, as you know well, europe has negative yielding bonds. in other words, their bonds, if you re going to lend you re paying them to lend the money. there s $16 trillion worth of negative yielding government bonds, mostly in europe and japan. we re running out of they re running out of tools with which to deal with a slow economy. the u.s. still has positive interest rates. that s forcing money to come into our bond markets. do they engage in tax cuts? do they find ways to stimulate their economy? so i think all of that is on the table. there s no easy answer to any of these questions. very quickly, what did you learn from that about who is calling the shots here or shaping the agenda for this summit to gabe s point about this being a strategic move. i was struck by how mentioning climate, calling it an agenda
relearn. i look at europe, we need new tools for the economy and new tax cuts. and third the digital world, how to frame this new world, obviously climate and environment is a big topic. we know the divergences in climate, but we need solutions, and i think in our conversations we will see some solutions. thanks again, mr. president, for
leaders need to talk about, national security, the environment, iran, for example. the focus, because of this fixation trump has on his trade war with china will certainly be on trade. he has a lot of issues with europe as well. he runs the disk here of fighting a trade war on two fronts. he wants to talk to the french about an internet tax they have. he has threatened a wine tariff on france. europe, he has hung car tariffs over their heads if they don t open up their markets more. japan, he s also mentioned the possibility of tariffs on japanese cars. he s not showing any signs of backing down from this trade rhetoric even as, back home this trade war with china continues to escalate and there s more and more concern from economists, investors that the u.s. is going to be thrown into a recession as the president is facing re-election. shannon, what did you make of what we saw a few moments ago.
i guess, to try to agree in certain areas maybe or make headway on certain issues, namely the economy. the president yesterday with his moves on china really pushed that to the forefront. it was already going to be an issue. there are a number of leaders who are worried about the u.s. trade war with china and how that s affecting their economies, particularly in europe where we ve seen softening of those economies. then you have a number of world leaders worried about whether president trump will slap them with tariffs on some of their goods. these threatened that with germany on cars, france on wines. then you have iran and north korea and those issues. overall it will be focussed on the economy. and then there s a number of side conversations that will happen individually with world leaders. then there s sort of these other big national security issues to deal with too. carol talking about the worry