'Lost in translation': Trump issues threats so 'vague' they bamboozle expert

President Donald Trump boasted that he had extracted a $600 billion "gift" from the European Union after threatening to impose 35-percent tariffs, but an economic analyst cast doubt on whether that money would ever be paid.

The president told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday morning that he had cut tariffs against the EU to 15 percent in exchange for the payment, which he said could be invested in "anything we want," but CNBC's senior analyst Ron Insana told MSNBC's Ana Cabrera that Trump's tactics were too "vague" to tell if they're effective.

"Well, we don't know because, you know, when what's what's being lost in translation is whether or not countries like Japan, South Korea, even the European Union are agreeing to write checks for anywhere up to $600 billion or more and simply hand the cash over to the United States, or whether they're offering loans or loan guarantees," Insana said.

"We don't know what the splits would be on any profits from investment. That's investments that foreign companies make in the United States. The president said the money will be invested at his discretion. There was some disagreement from other countries about that, and he also said that the U.S. would profit 90 percent to the other partners' 10 [percent], and there's been disagreement over that."

"So this is all very vague and very hard to make a cogent statement about," Insana added, "because both sides are saying different things about the very same dollar amounts, and so whether or not they're also just doing it to placate the president with no intention of following through is something we saw in the first Trump administration, when China promised to buy billions upon billions of dollars of U.S. agricultural products and never made good on those promises."

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