Another Trump-Quake has been shaking the world. In his attempt to, in essence, make America great again by eliminating its trade deficits and re-industrializing it into, in his own words, “an entirely different country,” US President Donald Trump has launched a global tariff campaign that has shocked the world by being even fiercer than expected.

Its details are convoluted – involving almost scholastic debates on the meaning of the term “reciprocal” as well as bizarre math to calculate the tariffs – and its impact is uneven, but its core is simple: The US is greatly, often massively increasing tariffs on imports from almost every other country in the world. It is thereby disrupting the international economic order as it currently exists, making a harsh contribution to wrenching it from moribund globalization into an emerging age of protectionism and geopolitically redirected trade flows.

In practical terms, if Trump’s policy is implemented as announced, the average duty that importers will have to pay – rising from an estimated 2.5 percent to 25 percent – will be higher than ever before since World War I. Individual examples of massive new additional tariffs include China (34 percent), India (27 percent), and the European Union (20 percent).

All of the above means that Washington has imposed tariffs even higher than during the extremely tense and dismal period between the Great Depression and World War Two. As the chief economist of a major bank has laconically remarked, the 1930s are back. Welcome to your future: it could well be a second-hand nightmare from a very dark past.

The immediate consequences of the great tariff coup have been dramatic: Trump announced his new tariffs on Wednesday, April 2. US “stocks, oil and the dollar tumbled” immediately, including flagship companies, such as Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Nike. On the whole, US markets took their worst hit since 2020. Literally trillions were wiped out almost faster than you can turn your MAGA cap around.

Of course, the downturn also spread around the world, reflected by stock markets in Canada, Germany, Japan, the UK, and China (though less so there than elsewhere). And this at a time when US macroeconomic data was better than for many other Western countries.

Mainstream politicians, journalists, experts, bankers, and business people have been casting about for words to express their confusion, fear, and frustration: “economic ignorance” and “nonsense” (Washington Post), “havoc” (The Economist), “max pessimism” (New York Times). And even if you include the........

© RT.com