Trump's tariffs: A reckless gamble or a necessary overhaul of trade?
And he belaboured global trade with them on Wednesday. Much of the planet is in shock. This includes penguins and seals who are the sole inhabitants of Heard and McDonald Islands, an Australian external territory near Antarctica, which has been slapped with a 10% tariff.
India is mildly disappointed that its constructive and radical offer to Washington — zero-for-zero tariffs on 70% of manufactured goods — didn't give it a reprieve beyond pharma. But GoI has sensibly taken a 'Keep Calm and Carry On' attitude to what it has come to recognise is a period of geopolitical upheaval, as the US, Russia and China, in their separate ways, disorder the global order.
The tariff announcement is giving rise to memes on the net, and migraines among government officials. Trump's hit list seems to have been put together in a god-awful hurry, with the US Trade Representative (USTR) office overwhelmed by the prez's request for rates that combined tariff differentials, non-trade barriers, sales taxes, and how much he wants to absorb the country into the US. Results were tariff calculations that made little sense numerically. Thus, Lesotho was tariffed 50%, Norfolk Island 29% (though it's part of Australia, which got a 10% hit), and Greenland and Canada not even mentioned.
But there is a method somewhere in Don's madness. MAGAnomics argues that international trade has been undermined by Chinese economic trickery (true); that the US must assume the trading system is no longer fair (kind of); and that the US must restore its