Welcome to Monday’s News on the March – The week that was in my digital world.
Like I imagine some of you have been doing, I have been watching presentations on the current hot news topic – Donald Trump’s tariffs. There remains opposed reactions to the tariffs which I would like to discuss below:
Two presentations in particular: UnHerd’s – Tariff Wars – What Happens Next and Ben Shapiro’s – Trump’s Tariff War Continues… both spell impending doom and gloom at Trump’s radical implementation of a global net of tariffs which mark the end of the globalisation era which has existed since the early 1990’s and has the world teetering on a 2008 style recession or worse. They seem to disdain the arrogance of Trump putting the whole world in this state of despair by trying to reverse 50 years of trade history and supply chains with the stroke of his pen.
Shapiro, sympathetic to free-market conservatism, suggests that consumers will bear the brunt, costs will rise, and retaliatory tariffs could stifle small businesses already strangled by post-pandemic inflation.
The UnHerd economic ‘experts’ conclude that for Europe, Australia and Canada to avoid recession they should introduce fiscal stimuli and ignore the US on trade and forge new alliances, most notably between themselves and China.
At the other end of the spectrum is the biologist couple – Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying’s latest Darkhorse podcast – There’s a New Tariff In Town. While both admit they are far from ‘experts’ on economics, they apparently welcome Donald Trump’s broad sweeping Tariffs because they mark what could be a significant shift in power away from the high falluting ‘Wallstreet’ crowd towards the overlooked ‘working-class’. So they see the tariffs not as economic suicide, but as a recalibration of national sovereignty and a potential economic renaissance for the U.S. working class. There are said to be about 10 million skilled people in the US that are currently not working, but want to. Their arguments unsurprisingly have an evolutionary logic: systems that depend on global fragility are less adaptive than those with redundancy and local capacity.
So who is right? Could they both be right?
Perhaps. The tariffs could destabilise global markets and inflate prices in the short term – especially if retaliatory measures kick in and inflation worsens, but with long-term cultural and labor recalibration such policies might reanimate the productive core of the U.S. economy, but at what cost to the rest of the World?
That is all. Thank you for reading.
Observation Blogger 