Transcript of Howard Lutnick’s Remarks At Hill & Valley Forum 2025

Because all the money is here. They can’t stay where they are. They don’t pay any money. There’s no alternative. There’s nowhere else to go.

We’re the only country on earth that pays for medicines, pays for R&D, pays to keep the world healthy. We do it. And so it is a power.

Industrial Manufacturing and Tariff Success

And then you have another $500 billion, we’ll call it, industrials. Cars, steel, core manufacturing business of America. Right?

What you may not have thought about, so if you go back to President Trump’s first term, he put on a tariff on light trucks. Light trucks. So think of the RAM 150, you know, the pickup trucks that are very popular in America. Now close your eyes and think every sedan you’ve ever seen, there’s lots of foreign brands. As a matter of fact, there’s many foreign brands as there are domestic brands. Right?

But think of light trucks. Can you think of a foreign brand that you’ve seen lately? See, you can’t imagine one. Because domestic production was driven by President Trump’s tariff of 25% on light trucks. So if you want to know does it work, is this sensible, just close your eyes or go walk around and say, do I see light trucks? And the answer is you see domestically manufactured light trucks. And that is amazing and it should give you the confidence of how this works.

Steel, just for a moment, if you want to talk about steel and aluminum, you all know what a blast furnace looks like. Right? That red hot, looks like lava being poured out. Well, what do you think the most expensive input to that business is? Do you think it’s the iron ore that you melt or the monstrous amount of energy and power you need to melt it? See, it’s all power.

Now, why did we used to have 50 blast furnaces and 50 aluminum smelters and now we have 10? Why do we have 10? It’s because if you’re in the steel and aluminum business, you’re competing with foreign governments, not foreign competitors. How much joy would you have if I called you up and said, the president has decided we’re going to back you as our national champion. You’re now going to kick the crap out of everybody in the world. How about that? We’ll sell you energy for half off. No, that’s not good enough. 75% off.

So the countries that have that kind of support dominate the steel business. They don’t dominate the steel business because we’re not good at it. They dominate the steel business because…

We had a trade conversation with a country that sells a lot of cars into America and we don’t sell hardly any cars into their market. We were getting nowhere. The meeting was coming to an end and the trade minister at the end of the meeting drops his head and goes, “Fine, we’ll give your car manufacturers the same subsidy that we give our car manufacturers.” Bang.

If I move my company from one state to another, you call the state’s economic development corporation and they make you a deal. They pay your taxes up, they give you a tax deal to go. What do you think the Europeans do with the VAT? Right? Does it cost them money to give someone back the tax money? Like if I move to another state and the state gives me a rebate of my tax money, it didn’t cost the state that money. That’s money that I brought into the state.

So we are competing. When we say non-tariff trade barriers, sometimes they’re regulatory rules that make it impossible for you to do business. Sometimes they’re just quotas or systems where you can’t have a dealer or you can’t do this or you can’t do that. But many, many times the reason you can’t succeed in those markets is because you’re not competing with a company. You’re competing with a company who’s got a partner who’s the government. And I’m not just talking about China.

Our president says, “friends and foe.” Because our allies are, if you think about it, we just weren’t paying attention. We just didn’t have an industrial policy. So they got away with it.

Learning the Hard Way with Trade Deals

I can sell like, one of the examples I give is Korea. In 2012, we made a deal with Korea that they could sell cars in America. I’m 63. When I was growing up, there was no Hyundai and Kia. These weren’t cars that I was used to seeing. In 2012, they started coming into our market. And the deal was, you could bring in cars and we’ll sell your market agriculture.

People in government made that deal. So what I’d heard was that then McDonald’s tried to bring in French fries. And they were rejected because McDonald’s could not prove the origin of the potato. So I asked the Korean trade minister, “I heard this story. Is this true?” Like, it sounded to me like classic folklore. The trade minister looked at me like I had no idea. And then he didn’t even answer.

Then we had another meeting. No answer. And then they made their offer. And in the middle of the second page was, “We will eliminate agricultural origin.” And I said to the guy, “Wow, that was a real story.” And he’s like, “Yes.”

You know, I get to do this stuff. So you can tell. First off, I’m vying for the cabinet member who’s having the best time. I just want you to know, that’s the contest I’m in. Who’s having a better time?

Cutting Through Trade Rhetoric

So I’m meeting with the Indian trade minister. I meet with a lot of trade ministers in case you’re wondering what I do all day. He says, “We are religiously…” First, they say we have a lot of farmers. We have to protect our farmers. We have a lot of small farmers. We have to protect our farmers.

And I said, “Yeah, but everybody’s got farmers that protect farmers. And we want to make a proper trade deal.”

He says, “Well, with respect to your row crops, corn, things, we’re religiously opposed to GMO, genetically modified seeds. It’s a religious thing.”

So I said, “Let me get this straight. You are religiously opposed to genetically modified seeds?” He says, “Yeah.”

I said, “So do all your farmers in India get their seeds from the seed monastery? Because the monastery is keeping the seeds because they don’t want to intermingle and intermarry with the rest of the seeds of the world. Because if you don’t have a genetically modified seed, the insects will shred your crop. So I said to him, oh, you’re right. You don’t have insects in India.”

And then what happens is you get to put these silly concepts aside and get to it.

The Real Impact of Trade Deficits

So we start with a 1.2 trillion dollar trade deficit. And people say trade deficits don’t matter. I have a trade deficit with my barber. Actually, I shouldn’t use that example. It’s not really a good one for me. I have a trade deficit with my grocery store. Right? I just buy stuff from them.

That’s ridiculous. If I buy 1.2 trillion dollars more from other people than they buy from me, I am driving their GDP to the tune of 1.2 trillion dollars. I’m driving their GDP.

So if we cut the trade deficit one quarter, 300 billion dollars, meaning if we brought home 300 billion dollars of production, our GDP is about 29 trillion dollars. So let’s just call it 30 for easy math. 300 billion dollars of increased domestic production will grow our GDP 1% a year for the rest of our lives.

So if you want to know why we’re doing it, because if we cut the trade deficit in half, that’s two points GDP growth in our economy. You see, if you study our economy, why are we, who are so amazing entrepreneurs and so great at so many things, why is our growth rate not dramatically, wildly impressively above everybody else?

And the answer is because after World War II, we decided to export the power of our economy to rebuild Europe, to rebuild Japan. Then we had the Korean War. We’re going to rebuild the Korean War. And then we had the Vietnam War. We’re going to rebuild Southeast Asia. And we’re always rebuilding. And never once did we think about, whoa, how about a little America?

Tangible Economic Benefits

So 1% of GDP if we get 300 billion of domestic production. So what happens is when we do a trade deal, you’re going to listen now because you’re at this dinner, because one of us on TV is going to say a number. This will be 5 billion dollars of additional market access. This will be 10 billion dollars of additional market access. This will be 15 billion. This will be 20 billion. This could be 50 billion.

And when you add that up, you’ll say, son of a gun, they’re going to add 1% at a minimum to GDP. That’s amazing. And what if they charge 10% tariff to the world? And we didn’t even go up a point, which is it’s definitely going up. You realize that’s 300 billion dollars a year in cash. That’s worth more than 1 point of GDP. I promise. That’s actually mathematically for the government worth about 2.5 points of GDP.

Construction. Remember some guy standing up here just before said the number, like some huge number, like 6 trillion dollars. Do you realize you have to hire a lot of construction people? I was at the TSMC plant. They said 40,000 construction workers are going to be working for them. They had one fab, which was 15,000 construction workers, but now that they’re building multiple buildings at the same time, they’ll get up to 40,000 workers. That’s GDP.

In every way you slice it, that’s 2 points of GDP. So, if you do trade deals, if you do construction, and you have tariffs, you have the greatest growth opportunity to the greatest economy in the world. And we will move demonstrably away from the growth rate of the rest of the world because we’re going to start thinking America first.

Now, when I tell the trade ministers who I talk to, I remind them that America first does not mean America only, and it does not mean America exclusively. It just means, look, we’re running a 2 trillion dollar budget deficit. We’re running a 1.2 trillion dollar trade deficit. We’ve got 36 trillion in debt. The world needs a strong, powerful America to protect the world, to protect the West, and to protect our way of life. So, give us a little time to get our house in order, but we will not do this to hurt

We are here talking about this to focus for a change after 80 years of focusing on you and letting you take advantage of us. How about we just focus a little bit on us to get our house in order, and then we’re not going to take actions that hurt you, but we’ve got to make sure that we bring manufacturing home.

So, let’s talk about manufacturing at home. What does that mean? We’re the world’s consumer, right? We’re the customer. China has just under a 20 trillion dollar GDP, and they consume under 10 trillion, okay? And we consume just over 20 trillion. So, we’re the customer of the world. We buy everybody’s things.

You can’t call your customer up, your dominant number one customer, the most important customer to you in the world, and say, you’re treating me badly. I don’t want to do business with you. No. When I was in business, when my best customer called me up and said something, I said, yes, sir. Stuff like that. So, I think we have more sway than the news media would have you think.

We are the customer of the world, and when they say, “Oh, they’re all going to do business with each other, South Korea and Japan are going to be pushed into the arms of China” – that’d be like a comedy movie. What, are they going to sell each other their cars? Really? I don’t think so.

The Impact of Trade Policies on American Workers

Because we didn’t have an industrial policy, we let China into the World Trade Organization. We let all these other countries have the opportunity, and companies basically figured out – think of NAFTA for a minute. Just think of NAFTA for a minute. You work at a car plant in Detroit or Ohio, and then the geniuses in Washington make a deal that say, you can move your plant to Mexico or Canada as if they’re a state. No worries. They’re like a state, right? You can go back and forth over the world. It’s like going from Alabama to Georgia. It’s nothing.

So, you move to Mexico. Labor’s inexpensive. You move to Canada, you can even have a union deal because the union deal is so much worse. It’s unbelievable because it’s another country. And for the companies that moved, this is genius. But for the people who lived Friday night lights, for the real people of America, this is the definition of a nightmare. Your plant where your father worked and your grandfather worked and where you were planning to work just moved to Mexico, and you are out of work, and you have no possibility of recovery.

Average life expectancy, right? The U.S. is one-third college educated, two-thirds high school educated. Pretty much the same as Europe. Average life expectancy of a high school educated worker in the United States of America, seven years less. It’s not the water. It’s not the food. It’s not the medicine. It’s despair. If I take your factory away and you don’t have the money to go train and change and do stuff, you just end up in a bad place, and then they send in fentanyl to finish you off. And you kill the productive people of America. 40-year-olds, who not only are our future workforce, but they will create our future population.

So this is a thoughtful attack on America that finally has an industrial policy base that’s thinking about these things and trying to address them.

Bringing Manufacturing Home Through Automation

So the idea is to bring manufacturing home. I don’t think we could have done it 10 years ago. Before I joined government, I didn’t really understand how this works. But if I say a half a sentence in the wrong order, it’s played in the press in a bad way.

Everybody knows, just as an aside, we are not going to take away a single penny from someone in Social Security who deserves the money. We’re the richest country on Earth. There’s no way we’re doing that. There’s no way we’re doing that.

What I said was that automation will allow contract manufacturing to come to America. Automation and AI will allow contract manufacturing to come to America. And because it’s automated, the mathematical price will be probably a little higher, but not so much higher that a tariff can’t solve the difference and allow that contract manufacturing to come back to America.

So when you bring automated manufacturing back to America, like the TSMC semiconductor plant, that FAB that I was at, which is as high tech as you could possibly get, there’s 3,500 full-time workers who work there. The person who was running the workforce who gave me the tour had tattoos on both arms and had a big set of rings in his ears. And the boss said, this guy’s the best. Because what you need is you need 3,000 or 2,500 technicians who are going to fix the automated thing. They’re going to fix that when it breaks. They’re going to keep the coolant going, who are making sure the power supply is working, to make sure the gas is being mixed correctly. I mean, all those things that are called tradecraft.

The Future of American Manufacturing and Tradecraft

We are going to go on the greatest training program this country has ever seen, where we’re going to go to the community colleges and the local universities and state schools and the vocational schools and the high schools and start teaching people tradecraft – electricians, carpenters, plumbers, but not just a plumber – someone who does a closed-loop coolant system of a high-tech factory. Jobs that start at $75,000 a year and go up to $125,000, not counting overtime and not counting being the boss. That’s the new industrial revolution of America.

It’s not going to be everything, but it’s going to be more things than you think it is. Because everybody who goes to China, they don’t build a factory. They call a contract manufacturer, Foxconn, Delta. They call those companies, and they do business in their factories. They have humans. We will have automation, and Americans taking care of that automation. And I promise you, it’s coming.

Industrial Policy and America’s Future

So I hope what I’ve explained tonight is that we have a leader who is focused on industrial policy, a policy that’s going to drive economic growth for the United States of America. It’s going to protect America while it’s building its industrial manufacturing base back. It is focused on us being able to take care of ourselves.

We need steel and aluminum for our protection. We need to make semiconductors because it is a key to every button that we push in our lives that works. I used to have a little lever that young people won’t know when you move the seat of your car. It used to be like a lever, and you would shift it like this. Now you have a button. That button has a chip, and everything has a chip. Cars have 300, 400 chips because you press this button, you press this button, you press this button.

They don’t necessarily have the high tech leading edge chip that is either in an iPhone. Or Jensen will describe that if you want an AI chip because it’s monstrous thinking, it’s a big chip. It’s not a small chip, and it can go into a big data center, not a small data center. People get confused. They think everything’s like a teeny little chip. Some chips are like as big as a refrigerator and way more.

So the administration is on it. It’s thinking about it. It’s trying to do it correctly. It’s done the way Donald Trump wants to do it. And that is our policy. Let the dealmaker make the deals. He is on it. This is what he has spoken about, and he has thought about his whole adult life. And I am just thrilled and honored to be part of his team. Thank you very much for having me tonight. I really appreciate it.

Please welcome to the stage co-founders of the Hill and Valley Forum, Jacob Helberg, Deleon Asparhov, and Christian Garrett.

Well, I have the good fortune of following Secretary

Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you, Secretary, for your words. Thank you for everyone for attending the fourth annual Hill and Valley Forum. We’re excited to have everyone here next year.

For all those in government who came, this hopefully is a symbol of what you can see from the tech industry, which is we are your supporters, we’re your allies. We want to work in your states, we want to work here in this country, we want to work together to solve problems and to win this competitive race. And we’ll be here every single year. All these companies here will be here weekly, it seems like, these days.

And thank you for all the work that you do across the aisle. We have Democrats here, Republicans. We have former secretaries, we have current secretaries. Companies that are competitors, firms that are competitors, everyone’s coming together around this subject. And so we hope everyone enjoys dinner, and let’s continue to get to work. Thank you.

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