Trump has signed the executive order today, and I’m afraid this is not going to be a little wobble like the emotional reaction to DeepSeek V3.
Some of it I think is a good idea, and potentially what the UK should be doing.
I call it the ‘Iceland’ model. They heavily tax certain imports so it is cost effective to say grow enough food to support their own population.
Why shouldn’t a country be fully self sufficient? Imagine if a country was fully self sufficient on both energy and food, then they wouldn’t be impacted as much by outside forces.
In the summer the U.K. is a net exporter in energy to Europe, and a net importer in winter. We also need to disconnect electricity prices from global gas prices.
That’s what we should all be doing to a threshold of around 80-90% plus.
Anyhow I think the ‘Trump Tariffs’ are all designed to bring manufacturing and jobs to the US. It’s a really good opportunity if done right.
indeed, i suspect his thinking is, tariffs can level the playing field for US based companies, so more will be manufactured there, by lifting the prices of imports, boost US employment. sounds ok in theory, but will still make those products more expensive, whether manufactured in US or imported with higher tariffs, thus inflationary impact on economy.
send the industrial base abroad and profit. when “abroad” starts doing the same stuff at cheaper prices, call them cheaters and stealers.
same stuff happened when Japan was dumping their crap on US, you know the hondas, toyotas, nissans, kawas, sony, toshiba, etc etc auto unions went crazy … Japan was put in place.
when service economies try to balance the act, this is what happens - the middle class pays the price.
Iceland trade balance is rather scary, and food self-sufficiency limited to only some products (like meat). Imagine scaling up that model to feed a population of 68m instead of 400k.
I believe frictionless trading is the only way forward, but happy to be proven wrong