Mixed market response after US-China deal | The Excerpt
On Tuesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: U.S. Stocks surged Monday after this week's US-China tariff deal. But a rally in Asian stocks overnight fell off and the dollar also wobbled. Paste BN White House Correspondent Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy talks through President Donald Trump's drug price executive order. Hamas has freed US-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander, as Israel says no to a ceasefire. Meanwhile, Gaza's population faces critical risk of famine. The Trump administration welcomed 49 white South Africans to the U.S., after granting them refugee status as alleged victims of racial discrimination. A screwworm threat forces the U.S. to halt cattle imports from Mexico. Paste BN Youth Mental Health Reporting Fellow Rachel Hale discusses how sports betting addiction is gripping some young men.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning, I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Tuesday, May 13th, 2025. This is The Excerpt.
Today, how markets are reacting to this week's tariff agreement with China. Plus, we take a closer look at Trump's move to reduce drug prices, and how sports betting addiction is gripping some young men.
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Markets rocketed higher yesterday after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US and China agreed tariffs would come down dramatically. The US will cut extra tariffs it imposed on Chinese imports in April to 30% from 145%, while Chinese duties on US imports will fall to 10% from 125%. The new measures are effective for 90 days. President Donald Trump in a briefing yesterday said it's about fairness.
Donald Trump:
Think about it, we opened up our country to China. I mean, they have very few restrictions, and they didn't open their country to us, never made sense to me, it's not fair, and they've agreed to open China, fully open China.
Taylor Wilson:
He said key elements of the deal included pledges from China to open markets to American businesses and to eliminate non-monetary trade barriers. He said China also agreed to cut off the flow of fentanyl to the US. The deal does not include tariffs on cars, steel, aluminum, and pharmaceuticals, Trump said. He also added that he plans to speak with Chinese leader Xi Jinping potentially before the end of the week. Meanwhile, a rally in Asian stocks ran out of steam and the dollar wobbled earlier today, indicating that trade worries linger despite the US-China deal.
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Drug prices in the United States are nearly three times those of 33 comparison countries, according to a report last year from the Health and Human Services Department, and President Trump signed an executive order yesterday directing drug makers to lower the prices of their medicines so they line up with what other countries pay. I spoke with Paste BN White House Correspondent Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy to learn more.
Swapna, thank you so much for joining me today.
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy:
Thank you, Taylor, for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
So just starting with the basics, Swapna, what exactly does this order do?
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy:
So President Trump signed an executive order asking drug makers to lower the prices of the medicines so that they are in alignment with what other countries are paying. And you have Secretary Kennedy, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who will be setting targets for price reductions across all different markets in the US, and this has to be done within 30 days. That's what a White House official told me. So if they don't do this in 30 days, then the Secretary could impose something called a most favored nation clause, which means the US prices could be capped at the lowest rates paid by other wealthy countries. So this is all up in the air, not sure how much of this is actually doable or not, but this is what the White House told us.
Taylor Wilson:
Swapna, how does this compare to how the Biden administration approached this issue?
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy:
So this is a very different approach. Under Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare could negotiate prices with pharma companies on a few medications, and so they'd already negotiated about 10 prescription drugs and they were supposed to go into effect in 2026. And in January, Medicare also announced another batch of about 15 drugs, and these include some of the very popular blockbuster weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy and others, and they're supposed to take effect in 2027. But those negotiations were supposed to happen this year, so they have not already been negotiated.
Taylor Wilson:
What's the sense on whether this will actually spur action from the companies to lower prices, Swapna, and what happens if they don't?
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy:
I guess they are expecting some kind of pushback from the pharma industry. The administration said they would pursue a host of regulatory options, but they haven't really been clear on what they might be
Taylor Wilson:
In terms of the response here, how are Democrats reacting?
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy:
Democrats basically are saying, if Trump was serious, he would go through Congress and do this through legislation. Senator Bernie Sanders, who has long pushed for lower prescription drugs, said something like, "His executive order will be thrown out by the courts." That's what he believes.
Taylor Wilson:
And as for the politics of this topic and this move, what might this mean politically for President Trump?
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy:
This is definitely a winning issue for him if he is able to actually make this happen. Whether that will be the case I guess remains to be seen. Definitely there would be pushback from the pharma industry, there's no doubt around that, but it all depends on what the courts decide to do on this.
Taylor Wilson:
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House Correspondent with Paste BN. Thanks as always, Swapna.
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy:
Thank you, Taylor.
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Taylor Wilson:
Hamas has released Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander from Gaza. He had been the last American held by the group. The move came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there would be no ceasefire and plans for an intensified military campaign would continue. Meanwhile, half a million Gazans face starvation according to a global hunger monitor yesterday. The integrated food security phase classification's latest report cited a significant deterioration since its last report in October. They said the Israeli blockaded enclave still faces a critical risk of famine.
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The Trump Administration warmly greeted 49 white South Africans on their arrival yesterday after granting them refugee status as alleged victims of racial discrimination. That's a charge disputed by the South African government and human rights activists. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said accusations of racial persecution of white South Africans is a completely false narrative. Trump's welcoming of South Africa's white minority stands in contrast to a stripping of refugee status for hundreds of thousands who have fled violence and political persecution from countries like Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
Hours after he took office, Trump shut down the refugee resettlement program, effectively ending a pathway for refugees to secure asylum in the US, and choking off all funding for refugee resettlement. Trump has said white farmers in South Africa are being brutally killed, but white South Africans are less likely to be murder victims than Black South Africans. The group Genocide Watch has noted that while South Africa's population is 8% white, white people make up just 2% of its murder victims. You can read more about this conversation with a link in today's show notes.
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Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said she's suspending imports of livestock through the Mexican border on a month by month basis. The move comes to protect US cattle from the threat of a dangerous flesh eating parasite infestation. The parasite is the New World screwworm, which is actually a fly and was eradicated in the United States almost 60 years ago. The Department of Agriculture said in a statement on Sunday that the screwworm was recently detected in remote Mexican farms within 700 miles of the US border. The statement cited unacceptable northward advancement of the parasite and said additional action must be taken. Mexico's agricultural council chief said the ban is unnecessary and does not solve the problem.
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Sports betting in recent years has swept college campuses, and for some young people it leads to complex debilitating addictions. I spoke with Paste BN Youth Mental Health Reporting Fellow Rachel Hale for more.
Hello, Rachel, welcome back.
Rachel Hale:
Hi, thanks so much for having me on.
Taylor Wilson:
Take us back to that 2018 Supreme Court decision that you outlined in this piece and how the sports gambling landscape really has changed since then.
Rachel Hale:
That 2018 Supreme Court ruling turned regulation of betting over to the states when it overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had made sports betting illegal in all but four states. Now, sports betting is legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia, and after that what quickly followed was a boom in advertisements and the online sports books, like DraftKings, Fanatics, BetMGM and dozens like them, which each have incentives for new customers to join.
So in the place of brick and mortar casinos and physical sports books, now anyone with a cell phone could bet legally at any time, and it's something that's become so ubiquitous with the male college experience that I've had some sources tell me it feels like the new binge drinking. So even if some young adults aren't talking about sports betting, they're bound to hear about it while watching major games thanks to advertisements and announcers mentioning betting odds. So it's become a much larger part of the youth male experience.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, on that point, Rachel, I mean, what do experts say really about the dangers of gambling addiction for young people in particular?
Rachel Hale:
First just what we know about the teenage brain is that teenagers executive functioning, abstract thinking and decision-making skills only fully develop at age 25. So young adults aren't able to deal with those highs and lows of gambling and the quick reflex decision-making in the same ways that an adult can. I spoke with Dr. Timothy Fong, the co-director of UCLA's gambling studies program, and he told me that a lot of teens who gamble, and young adults, also inaccurately conflate their success in gambling with skill, and that was backed up by some of the young men who I spoke with who told me that they often felt that they were going to be able to be the exception to gambling problems and that they could beat the odds.
It's also just that a lot of young men think that it's going to be an easy way to make money. One sports fan I mentioned, Rob Minnick, who's now 26 and in recovery, said it felt like a no-brainer back in high school to bet on the games he was watching anyways. At the time he was making $8 an hour scooping ice cream, so you can see the appeal for a young man who's already watching sports and it's already a part of their conversations with friends.
Taylor Wilson:
Rachel, you're right that there's really a stigma around this form of addiction. How and why is that?
Rachel Hale:
Unlike traditional forms of addiction where there might be a substance, it's really hard for people to understand sports betting because it seems like something they think you can just put your phone down and stop. And some of the parents of young adults who are addicted told me that that was one of the biggest learning curves to being a better supporter for their children, was understanding that this addiction functions in the same way as any others.
And Dr. Fong told me that also for years he would see patients who struggle with physically going into the casino, driving 90 minutes or an hour to go gamble, but now a lot of the folks he sees have never set foot inside of a casino and the only one they know is on their phone. So because the nature of gambling has changed so much, it's even harder for people to understand now that it's so tied to our phones, it's much harder to go without than actually driving a physical distance somewhere. But chemically it functions the same way as substance addiction, but experts at the National Council on Problem Gambling tell me that a lot of people incorrectly see it as a moral failing or lack of self-control, which is really just a misconception.
Taylor Wilson:
And Rachel, in terms of what addiction advocates want here, do they want to roll back gambling legislation altogether? Do they want to just have more resources for folks going through this kind of addiction? What's the sense from them?
Rachel Hale:
A lot of the sports advocates that I've spoken with would definitely like to see more in terms of legislation, not just related to the online sports books, but related to advertising. A lot of advertisements in the Super Bowl, for example, with DraftKings or FanDuel or on other platforms, a lot of young men are going to watch those. And there isn't federal legislation that mandates how sports betting advertisements go out, unlike some legislation related to traditional casino gambling, and so a lot of young men who watch these advertisements, even though there are disclaimers about the potential harm, are seeing something that makes it seem like gambling is an easy way to make money, and it's really exciting and cool, and some of their favorite sports players, like Rob Gronkowski, are out as part of these ads.
So it's exciting and the appeal is definitely there, so a lot of advocates I've spoken with would like to see more guardrails in terms of the advertisements, but also on the actual betting apps they would like to see more advocation for some of these self-exclusion apps. So for example, widgets like Gamban, BetBlocker, Gamboc, and GamStop can stop access to accounts for a set period, kind of similar to how you might use a self-imposed screen time limit on addictive social media apps.
In addition to that, a lot of the experts I spoke with said young men can responsibly gamble but need to be more conscious of their motivations, and especially because a lot of the men who get into it might start at a high school or college age, it's important for college campuses, Greek life systems, other places where young men are facilitating as part of a community to have resources in place now that this has become something that is akin to the male experience in a similar way to drinking.
Taylor Wilson:
fascinating journalism from you as always, Rachel. Rachel Hale is Paste BN's Youth Mental Health Reporting Fellow. Thanks, Rachel.
Rachel Hale:
Thank you so much.
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Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the show wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt.
As always, you can talk to us at podcasts@usatoday.com. Just shoot us an email. I'm Taylor Wilson, I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.