Andrew Ross Sorkin: Trump Rally or Bessent Put? Elon Back at Tesla, Google's Gemini Problem, China's Thorium Discovery

This episode opens without one of the regular hosts, who is described as being in Detroit at a Knicks game. Journalist and author Andrew Ross Sorkin sits in, introduced on air as "the world's greatest moderator." Before the discussion begins, the show promotes its All In Summit, which it describes as entering its fourth year and taking place in September in Los Angeles, with applications at AllIn.com/Summit.

The first question is about a market rally. Stocks are described as up three to 7% for the week, while the signals on a China trade deal keep changing: the President says talks are happening, and China says nobody is talking. The panel is asked whether the rally reflects a "Bessent put," a Federal Reserve put, or something else. Earnings from Alphabet and Tesla are flagged as other factors moving prices.

One panelist starts by defining the term. A put, in this sense, is when the market falls, investors complain, and the government steps in to buy securities at depressed prices. Usually this happens through the Federal Reserve. In rare crises such as 2008, the Treasury creates a program, like TARP during the global financial crisis. This panelist's answer to whether a put exists now is "no."

The reasoning is that the market had only returned to roughly where it was in May or August of the previous year. The panelist says they would have been shocked if someone had predicted that fifty years of economic policy could be upended with markets off only five or 600 basis points. The panelist then asks who wants a put. Their answer is the active traders hurt by volatility. They name Ackman as negative and Ken Griffin as having recently turned negative. They suggest this reflects those traders not monetizing volatility the way they used to, not a sign that the world is ending.

A second panelist builds on this with a tweet by Nick Carter that they say they retweeted when the selloff began:

if you think a market sell off delegitimizes Trump's presidency, you're gonna give him unconditional credit when it rallies.

In this panelist's view, the media built a "Bessent put" story so it would not have to credit Trump. They praise Scott Bessent as smart, knowledgeable about bond markets and reassuring to them. They also predict a pattern: each week the media will single out one administration member for credit, then tear that person down and move on to another, so the administration as a whole never gets credit. They argue that if Trump is blamed every time the market falls, he should get credit when it recovers, and that commentators are generally reluctant to do this.

Another view is that the week removed the market's fear that the administration was "crazy enough to let it all fall apart." On this view, markets concluded that Bessent and Trump would not let trade stop or the global economy grind to a halt. Signs that deals were coming implied the administration wanted to keep both the market and the economy from collapsing.

The panel recalls arguing about three weeks earlier that the tariffs were an opening salvo. Some would call the move too extreme, but it was framed as a bid to shift the whole conversation and build leverage for deals. One speaker cites a Harvard negotiation teacher's advice to set the anchor point as far away as possible, and adds: "I don't know what's farther away than a 45% tariff." The speaker argues that this starting point allows deals that would have looked impossible if negotiations had begun from a 0% tariff.

Then comes a real disagreement. One participant suggests that once the risk of an extreme outcome is priced out, the U.S. has less leverage. Another objects at once: "That's not true." The first speaker continues. If the goal is to pressure China, and the bond market and the administration have shown where the floor is, then trading partners such as Mark Carney, the EU, India or Japan might take the position that the U.S. needs them as much as they need it.

The rebuttal separates market prices from what this speaker calls actual reality. They describe the stock market as an estimate of the future at a rate of return, a view laid over reality. Their concrete claim concerns trade flows. They say the U.S. was running about negative $2,000,000,000 a day in trade deficits on March 31, the day before Liberation Day, and that the tariffs should have flipped that to positive. They admit uncertainty about the size: "How positive? We don't know," though they assume the government knows.

For China, the speaker offers estimates explicitly framed as suspicion. China may have been plus three or 4,000,000,000 a day and may now be near breakeven or negative. As of April 25, the taping date, they suggest the U.S. may have moved from minus two to maybe plus one, and China from plus four to maybe zero or minus one. In their view, this change in cash flows creates the leverage needed for a deal. Whether the S&P forward P/E should be 16 or 22 times matters less.

The guest moderator raises a different limit. The U.S. has long-term leverage, and investors, including China, will ultimately want to invest in America. The question is whether the U.S. has the patience, given its democracy, its bond market and "such an ADD society." The cash-flow speaker accepts the point and proposes better messaging: the whole cabinet should repeat one point, that cash flow went from negative to positive, and back it with actual numbers.

Asked whom to believe on the China talks, one panelist says that outside AI and crypto, the two issues they work on, they are "just a civilian." They say they are not part of the trade conversation and cannot answer directly. They describe recent weeks as an important stress test that exposed dependencies built up over decades. They repeat a view from an earlier episode with Larry Summers: bringing China into the WTO twenty five years ago was a huge mistake.

Their main complaint is that China still holds WTO developing-nation status. They say this may have been legitimate in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping began reforms and the average Chinese person earned $2 a day. It became more questionable by a later year (the transcript renders the date unclearly) and makes no sense in 2025. They say the status lets China use tariffs, subsidize industries and follow different timetables, and that China has used this to take over strategic choke points in global supply chains.

Rare earths are the main example, and the speaker calls recent New York Times coverage largely accurate. The ore is distributed worldwide, and China's advantage in deposits is not huge. Processing is the expensive, complicated step, and China is described as handling over 90% of it. China also makes "something like over 90%" of cast rare earth magnets, which go into nearly every electric motor, including in cars. The speaker says China has cut off the United States, that the issue is unresolved, and that they trust it will be settled through bilateral talks aimed at de-escalation.

we worshiped at the altar of this like free trade god to the point where we became dependent on China for these critical components in our supply chain.

The speaker calls this a catastrophic mistake for national security. They describe China as "not our ally" and "a country of concern," and call for rapid, major corrections.

Another participant raises a point they say gets little attention: regulatory parity. A foreign company, an Indian one for example, can easily form an LLC, open a bank account, lease space and sell in the U.S. American companies, they argue, face no such ease abroad.

Their example is Monsanto in India around 2005–2006, as the transcript renders the dates. Monsanto launched cotton seed with a trait that kept worms from eating the cotton. According to the story, farmers had paid 450 rupees an acre for seed. The new seed cost 1,500 or 1,400 rupees per acre but brought about 5,000 rupees per acre in extra profit. Ninety percent of farmers adopted it by choice. The Indian government then imposed price controls back to the old level (the transcript says "$4.50", apparently meaning the earlier price), sued, and in the speaker's words "stole their IP." The company, said to have invested well over a billion dollars, left the country.