Trump's tariff tactics: Will India dance or dodge the economic drama?

Trump claims to have fixed tariffs at half the level of those imposed by other countries. Hardly any country has only one tariff on everything. So, presumably, he — or his arithmetically-educated advisers — would have to calculate an average of country tariffs. A simple average would make no sense. Although the assumption that he distinguishes between sense and nonsense would be too strong. So, the average would have had to be weighted by the relative importance of the imported goods. We have no idea how the weights were calculated. USTR has given the formula used to calculate the tariff. But it has a symbol — ε (epsilon) — in it that makes all the difference. It has neither given the symbol’s value, nor how it was calculated. All that Trump has told us is that his closeness to the leader of the exporting country made no difference to the tariff. In other words, the rate of return on our PM’s conviviality has been zero.

Should we worry about Trump’s abrupt, startling aggression? The US is our biggest customer among all countries. In 2023-24, it took 17.4% of our exports. Optimists may say that it’s wrong to take physical exports. Our biggest exports to the US have been intellectual services. But that only adds to America’s importance.

Early reactions have been quite optimistic. The main reason is that Trump has been even more nasty to some of our competitors. China, the world’s largest, or second-largest, economic power, depending on who makes the calculation, has received the greatest punishment. Hence, our