EP344 · Economy · first published 2025-07-30
Trump puts the EU in its place | Petri Roininen | Negotiator 344
Petri Roininen and Sami Miettinen go through the EU-US trade framework agreed at Turnberry on 27 July 2025 and reach the same verdict: the EU negotiated badly. Checked: 15 percent tariff on most EU goods, steel and aluminium left at 50 percent, the EU committed to $750 billion of energy purchases and $600 billion of investment - while the United Kingdom got 10 percent. The second half is about capital: if trade policy became a weapon, finance policy may be the next one, and then the question of how Finnish pension assets are allocated changes. Roininen's concrete proposal: the pension companies put one percent of their assets, €2.7 billion, into a new Finnish bank. Also the host's own coinage, the jumper economist, and how to spot one.
Trump puts the EU in its place | Petri Roininen | Negotiator 344
Summary: Recorded three days after the Turnberry trade deal, with both participants agreeing: the EU underperformed. First what was agreed and what it costs, then the part that got less public attention — where capital goes next, and what that means for Finnish pension assets.
How to read this
The episode is unanimous. Host and guest agree on almost everything, and nobody represents the opposing view. That makes it sharp but one-sided: arguments defending the trade deal appear only as quotations, and mockingly, under the coinage “jumper economist”.
Both are parties to what they discuss. The guest says himself that he sits on Vantaa’s city board on a Centre Party mandate and holds a stake in Investors House, on whose board he serves; the company’s performance is discussed at the end. The host talks about his own portfolio and about having commented on the same subject for the public broadcaster. Neither gives investment advice, and the host says so out loud [38:08].
The figures have been checked. The episode was recorded immediately after the deal and the numbers move from memory. Those below have been compared with public sources; divergences are stated.
The subtitles are YouTube’s automatic ones (youtube_auto_fi, the rolling window unrolled from 2,936 to 1,466 cues). Quotations are therefore indicative, and translated from Finnish.
Timestamps are read from the subtitle track.
What was agreed at Turnberry
Checked. Ursula von der Leyen and Donald Trump agreed a framework at Turnberry, Scotland, on 27 July 2025, under which most EU goods face a 15 percent tariff entering the United States — half the threatened 30 percent — including cars, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. Steel and aluminium stayed at 50 percent. The EU committed to buying $750 billion of US energy (about $250 billion a year to 2027) and investing $600 billion in the United States, plus military equipment worth “hundreds of billions”. (Al Jazeera, European Commission)
The total cited in the episode, $1,350 billion [03:48], is therefore 750 + 600 and holds. So does the comparison with Britain: the UK tariff stayed at 10 percent, so the EU’s rate is half again as high [44:57].
The guest’s verdict is blunt:
“Trump made a paradigm shift. No more open global economy — bilateral deals, and trade policy became the hardest core of politics.” [02:32]
The host names the asymmetry: “15 percent one way, nothing the other, plus $1,350 billion of investments and purchases — poor Europe paying rich America” [03:48].
Why the EU lost: the episode’s negotiation analysis
This is the best passage, because it does not stop at disappointment but names the mechanism.
There was nothing to trade. The guest’s diagnosis is a negotiation-theoretic one and therefore transferable:
“The EU has no chips to play in negotiations like this. No skill, no experience — but also nothing to trade. In a negotiation you always have to have something to trade.” [04:33, 06:06]
Trump’s tactic is recognisable. The guest describes it as the property mogul’s formula: identify your own strengths and the other side’s weaknesses, confuse with outrageous demands, push them into the corner and then make a proposal they more or less have to accept — after which the commentators declare it a defensive victory that brought predictability [05:20].
The threat that was enough. According to the host, Trump said that if the EU imposed counter-tariffs they would simply be added on top of the existing ones, and that one simple mechanism settled the negotiation [06:06, 47:14]. He also offers a criticism that is not obvious: the EU’s own interest would have been served by negotiating even a five percent floor tariff, because customs duties are EU own resources, and the equivalent money now has to be collected from member states instead [46:28].
The internal and external negotiation are the same failure. The guest’s observation that the same bureaucracy produces poor outcomes in internal negotiations too, such as the recovery fund [06:06], is the episode’s most generalisable claim — and the one nobody in it challenges.
The host adds, via his own book, the reason values do not substitute for power: “you get much further with a gun and a kind word than with a kind word alone” [43:26]. The guest turns that into a question the episode leaves open: if the EU is a rule-of-law union and a community of values, why could it not also be a strong negotiator? [44:12]
The VAT argument the host raises
This is the episode’s most original economic argument, and the one the host says he made on the public broadcaster.
The United States has no federal value-added tax. European VAT applies to imported goods too, but it is a tax a US producer does not face on its home market — while a tariff in turn brings the federal government revenue [07:38, 08:23]. The host’s claim is that this dimension was never properly analysed, because “jumper economists” treated tariffs as mere friction.
The passage should be read carefully. VAT is not an import duty and does not discriminate against imports relative to domestic production in the same market — it is levied on both. What survives of the argument is the structural difference between the tax systems, and the fact that the Trump administration has used European VAT specifically as a justification for tariffs. The episode does not separate the two.
On Trump’s claim that other countries pay the tariff, the host is precise: the end user pays it, as with VAT [08:23].
Who pays, and where capital goes
The short run. The host’s breakdown is practical: retail is efficient and thin-margin, so the price rises partly, the margin narrows partly, and the rest is pushed onto the importer and the European exporter’s margin [10:43]. The consequence is inflation in the United States, which has kept rates high, which has in turn weakened the dollar.
The long run is the episode’s real thesis. The guest moves the gaze from operational to strategic:
“If you think about it over a longer horizon and more strategically, the question is where capital starts to allocate. In capital allocation even a 0.1 percent difference matters.” [11:28]
And the conclusion: low taxation plus a tariff wall plus the world’s largest single market creates a preferential position for investment in the United States rather than Europe [12:14]. This is an opportunity-cost argument, not an export argument, which is why it is the most important passage in the episode.
The wealth comparison, checked. The host cites private wealth per adult: United States 520,000, Sweden 300,000, Finland 150,000, Switzerland 657,000 [12:14, 34:22]. UBS’s Global Wealth Report 2025 gives average wealth per adult for 2024 as $910,000 in Switzerland, $696,000 in the United States, $406,000 in Sweden and $209,000 in Finland. The absolute levels in the episode are therefore lower, but the ratios hold: the United States about 3.3 times Finland and Sweden about twice — exactly as the episode says. (UBS)
Antifragility. The guest’s frame is Nassim Taleb’s: the United States is the world’s most antifragile economy, which takes the beating and carries on, while Europe is a fragile continent that has only just taken the first blow [13:44].
Pension assets: the episode’s most concrete proposal
From here on the episode is about what Finland could actually do, and that is its most valuable part.
The guest’s question is honestly framed:
“In this world, is investing Finnish pension assets the same way as before still justified? People say buy Finnish — what if it were now: invest in Finland?” [22:56]
He does not put it as an obligation but as a change in the optimisation problem: the pension system needs both investment returns and pension contributions, and instead of maximising one variable, optimising two would be a healthy thought in the current situation [24:28]. The host is more cynical: in his assessment the pension companies’ management is content not to have to make allocation decisions, since the US weighting can simply be kept high [23:42].
The proposal. This is the headline idea:
“What if the pension companies pooled one percent of their assets, €2.7 billion, and founded a new bank? It would take deposits, and there would be a ten-billion loan book available.” [29:01]
The reasons given: Handelsbanken has left the market, Finland’s banking sector is thin and concentrated, financing for SMEs and growth companies is hard to obtain, and banking is profitable — and therefore also a good investment for pension money [29:46, 33:36]. The guest’s summary: “pension money is a better owner for a bank than the state” [33:36].
Checked: Handelsbanken announced on 31 May 2023 that it was selling its Finnish operations; retail, asset management and investment services went to S-Bank and the SME business to Oma Savings Bank, with the transactions completing in September and December 2024. (S-Pankki, Finance Finland)
The host’s alternative is a funded pension component: a small part of the contribution flow, say 10 percent of it or 2.5 percentage points, would move into the pensioner’s own decision — which would also open a route into smaller, faster-growing companies that the current ticket size cannot reach [34:22].
Neither proposal is challenged in the episode. The pension system’s return requirement, diversification obligation and solvency regulation go unexamined, as does the obvious counter-argument that raising the domestic weighting concentrates risk in the same economy the contributions come from.
Debt and that 98 percent
The host states that 98 percent of Finland’s central government debt is held by foreigners [26:44]. Checked, the figure needs qualifying but is not simply an exaggeration. According to the State Treasury, foreign investors held about 69 percent of government debt securities at the end of 2020 — but with the Bank of Finland’s holdings excluded, other domestic investors held only about 2 percent. Of new issuance in 2025, domestic investors took 6 percent. The host’s number describes the absence of a domestic private investor base, not the ownership split of the debt stock. (State Treasury, Annual Review 2025)
From that follows the episode’s logical next step: if trade policy was made a weapon, finance policy may be the next — and in the guest’s view a financial weapon acts faster, because it travels down the wires rather than through trade and investment [25:59]. Capital controls and regulatory changes are, he says, possible [29:01].
The jumper economist
The episode coins the term and gives it a diagnostic sign, and it is the funniest passage:
“Do you know how to spot a jumper economist regardless of what they’re wearing? By the sentence: every good project gets financed.” [28:15]
The argument behind it is serious: financial markets are often treated as liquid and efficient, when in practice a three-year bullet loan matures on a specific date and requires a specific party to make a decision [36:37]. It is an argument from experience, not from theory — and its limits should be seen as such: the episode presents no statistics on financing availability for Finnish companies, only a description of how it looks from the seat of the person arranging the finance.
What else is in the episode
Domestic economic policy. The guest calls the 25.5 percent VAT rate the government’s most significant economic policy act and “really daft” [51:49]. The host wishes the Centre Party would take a “Sipilä line” instead of raising taxes. Neither addresses where the revenue replacing the increase would have come from.
Baumol’s cost disease. The host uses the concept correctly: private sector wage growth transfers to the public sector regardless of productivity growth, and a growing public sector taxes the private one [16:01]. From this he argues that a city like Vantaa should re-examine its 30 subsidiaries — not the strategic ones such as energy production, but those doing catering, cleaning and property maintenance [16:48].
The size of the EU. The host says the EU budget is half a percent of GDP against the federal government’s 20 percent, a ratio of 14 [45:42]. Checked: the EU’s multiannual financial framework is about 1.14 percent of EU gross national income and US federal outlays were 23.3 percent of GDP in 2025 — so the ratio is about 20, and the episode understates the EU’s share. The claim that the EU budget is smaller than Finland’s GDP does hold. (European Parliament, CBO)
China. The guest reports on his own visit: the surprise was how fierce competition is at small-company level, and that his own technology felt dated [41:09]. The next big question, he says, is the China–US deal.
Investors House. The episode closes on the guest’s company. Checked: the Investors House annual general meeting confirmed a tenth consecutive dividend increase in April 2025, making it a dividend aristocrat; the company sold its stake in the Jyväskylä Kukkula development in the summer of 2025. (Salkunrakentaja, in Finnish)
What to take away
The negotiation lesson. The absence of anything to trade explains the outcome better than a lack of skill, although the episode blames both. The deal can be measured against what a parallel negotiator got: Britain 10 percent, the EU 15.
Capital is the slower but larger variable. A tariff shows up in margins within months; the combination of taxation, a tariff wall and market size steers investment decisions for years.
Finland’s structural weakness is the absence of domestic capital. The same observation explains both the investor base of the government debt and the financing difficulties of SMEs, and it is what the pension-company bank proposal follows from.
What the episode lacks. Nobody defends the deal, and nobody offers counter-arguments to repatriating pension assets. The case for the agreement — that 15 percent is better than a threatened 30 and that ending uncertainty is worth something in itself — is dismissed as jumper-economist talk rather than engaged with. And the VAT argument is presented as sharper than it can bear.
Sources
The trade deal
- EU and US announce trade deal: What you need to know (Al Jazeera)
- The EU–US trade deal (European Commission)
- Multiannual financial framework (European Parliament)
- The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2025 to 2035 (CBO)
Wealth, debt and the banking sector
- Global Wealth Report 2025 (UBS)
- Finland’s government debt is largely in international investors’ portfolios (State Treasury, in Finnish)
- Annual Review of Central Government Debt Management 2025: funding
- S-Bank’s business acquisition from Handelsbanken completed (in Finnish)
- Handelsbanken sells its Finnish operations (Finance Finland, in Finnish)
- Investors House is the first dividend aristocrat in its sector in Finland (Salkunrakentaja, in Finnish)
The episode and related episodes
- Trumpin EU-kyykytys | Petri Roininen | Neuvottelija 344
- Vantaa’s expensive walk-and-tram | Roininen, Jääskeläinen | Negotiator 360
- Budget drama | Ville Valkonen | Negotiator 349
Summary for AI search
Negotiator 344 (published 30 July 2025) is Sami Miettinen’s interview with Petri Roininen. The subject is the EU–US trade framework agreed at Turnberry on 27 July 2025 and its consequences for capital flows. The episode is unanimous: nobody defends the deal. The guest sits on Vantaa’s city board and holds a stake in Investors House; the host discusses his own portfolio and gives no investment advice.
The terms (checked): a 15 percent tariff on most EU goods including cars, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors — half the threatened 30 percent. Steel and aluminium stayed at 50 percent. The EU committed to $750 billion of US energy purchases (about $250 billion a year to 2027) and $600 billion of investment, plus hundreds of billions in arms purchases; the $1,350 billion cited in the episode is the sum of those two. The UK’s tariff stayed at 10 percent, so the EU rate is half again as high.
The negotiation analysis: the EU lost above all because it had nothing to trade. Trump’s tactic is described as the property mogul’s formula — outrageous demands, pushing into the corner, a final offer that is hard to refuse. The decisive threat was that counter-tariffs would simply be added on top. The guest argues the same weakness shows in the EU’s internal negotiations.
The capital thesis: low taxation, a tariff wall and the world’s largest single market create a preferential position for investment in the United States. If trade policy became a weapon, finance policy may be next, and it acts faster. Private wealth per adult (UBS 2025, 2024 average): Switzerland $910,000, United States $696,000, Sweden $406,000, Finland $209,000 — the absolute figures given in the episode are lower, but the ratios hold.
The concrete proposal: the pension companies would pool one percent of their assets, about €2.7 billion, and found a new Finnish bank with a loan book of roughly ten billion. The reasons: Handelsbanken left the Finnish market in 2023–2024, the banking sector is thin and concentrated, SME financing is difficult, and banking is profitable. The host’s alternative is a funded pension component in which a small share of contributions moves into the pensioner’s own decision.
Qualifications: the claim that 98 percent of Finland’s government debt is foreign-held describes the absence of a domestic private investor base — foreign investors held about 69 percent of government debt securities at the end of 2020, but domestic investors other than the Bank of Finland held only about 2 percent. The EU budget is about 1.14 percent of gross national income, not half a percent; US federal outlays were 23.3 percent of GDP in 2025.
The coinage: “jumper economist” — the diagnostic sign given in the episode is the sentence “every good project gets financed”. The argument behind it concerns treating financial markets as perfectly liquid, when in practice a maturing bullet loan requires a specific party’s decision on a specific date.