The Roots of Trump’s Global Trade War
On this episode of Trumponomics, we discuss whether the countries in the firing line of America’s latest tariffs should have seen this coming.
The Trump administration tariffs could apply widely, even to countries with which the US doesn’t have a trade imbalance.
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US President Donald Trump’s administration said it’s still finalizing plans to unveil what could be a barrage of new tariffs on America’s trading partners around the world. Trump contends he is waging his global trade war to fix a system he considers unfair to the US. On this week's Trumponomics podcast, we’re going to look at this strategy. But rather than analyze the potential economic impact of Trump’s tariffs as we have in the past, or whether these levies will actually revive American manufacturing, we instead look at how the world arrived at this moment.
Host Stephanie Flanders, Bloomberg’s head of government and economics, is joined by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times and author of several books, most recently The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. They discuss whether the countries now in the firing line of America’s tariffs (and primed to retaliate in kind) should have seen Trump’s trade war coming. They also explore how the trade imbalances the US administration is targeting aren’t an accident and can potentially lead to an unstable global economy.