Jeffrey Lonsdale: US Tariffs as Policy, Taiwan Risk Calculus & Southeast Asia’s Supply Chain Opportunity - E562

“So if the Trump administration only does tariffs, that's not going to be enough to increase the production inside the US, but if they figure out how to cut these various—and it's not just cutting the red tape where the red tape is completely useless—there's even scenarios where, yes, we want these environmental regulations. We don't want you dumping toxic chemicals into the river, but we're going to have you prove that you're doing this in a far more cheap and efficient way than you had to prove in the past. So you pay less lawyers, less consultants, and the project gets going much faster, which lowers the cost of capital of the project in total. And there's ways where hopefully that can result in a lot more manufacturing being done inside the US. And that's the positive scenario where the US industrial base is revitalized from a collection of these policies in total. And maybe the rest of the Western world as well also realizes that they need to pivot away from the dependency on China and that they also are able to do something similar in their economies.” - Jeffrey Lonsdale, Investor and Advisor

“I would just advise them not to panic as much about this as they seem to be panicking, and also to realize that there is far more of a method to what's coming out of the U.S. than people think. The Europeans are now scrambling to do exactly what the U.S. has been trying to get them to do for the last 10–15 years, which is actually spend more of their money on defense and take care of themselves. They're doing it because they're angry at Trump, but they're actually doing it now. And so people say, oh, it was a mess-up, like how he angered all those people. But he got exactly what—not just what Trump wants—but what the U.S. has always been trying to accomplish.” - Jeffrey Lonsdale, Investor and Advisor

“From the perspective of the US, one of the positive scenarios is that instead of actually trying to only use tariffs to fix this problem—tariffs are one part of the solution—they implement other aspects to make it easier to build in the US. You always look at these numbers where it costs more for the US to build roads, it takes almost twice as long for them to build new semiconductor plants compared to other places around the world, and there's all this red tape and regulation that needs to be cut through in order to allow people to build as quickly and as efficiently inside the US as they do outside the US.” - Jeffrey Lonsdale, Investor and Advisor

Jeremy Au sits down with Jeffrey Lonsdale to unpack the US-China trade standoff, the Taiwan flashpoint, and how Southeast Asia is adapting to global shifts. They explore how tariffs are reshaping supply chains, the risk of trade wars escalating, and the difficult position countries like Vietnam and Singapore now find themselves in. The conversation also looks ahead at how governments, investors, and founders should think about resilience in a volatile world.