Tariffing China | Danube Economics

Billionaire fund manager Bill Ackman says Donald Trump is waging “an economic war against the whole world at once”.

Trump insiders haven’t put it much less dramatically. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio bluntly said, “Markets are crashing because… companies are embedded in modes of production that are bad for the United States.”

For Trump, dismantling global trade interdependence is not a side effect—it’s the point.

But the collateral damage is vast.

ECB board member Isabel Schnabel warned that what Trump triumphantly calls “Liberation Day” “was not liberating” at all, but rather “marks the end of global free trade.”

It is certainly the most dramatic day in global trade since the accession of China to the WTO in 1999. That moment marked the low water mark of tariffs, and the coming of a truly globalised world economy.

So if that era is indeed now over, what does that mean for China? And indeed the manufacturing-intensive Eastern rim?

Trump’s China strategy has always been bullish. Is this a bull in a china shop?

To discuss this Great Leap Forward, Dr Eric Henrdiks is joined by economist Philip Pilkington.