Tyler Cowen: ‘Liberation Day’ Was Even Worse Than Expected

Liberation Day has come and gone, and sorry to say, I do not feel any freer. At least on the surface, Donald Trump’s announcement, made yesterday in the Rose Garden, goes well beyond the more pessimistic expectations.

CATO scholar Scott Lincicome summed up the executive order best:

Trump’s reciprocal tariffs:

1) Impose hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes on Americans without public/congressional input

2) Are based on secret calculations that have little, if any, connection to actual foreign trade barriers

3) Ignore all U.S. tariff/nontariff barriers, which in some cases are quite high

4) Are justified by a “national emergency” that reflects a total misunderstanding of how trade deficits work

5) Disregard U.S. trade agreement commitments, including ones made by Trump himself

6) Will make us all poorer, and likely do real and lasting harm to the U.S. economy (including in manufacturing)

7) Embolden our adversaries around the world.

And those are just the ones off the top of my head.

Markets responded accordingly, with the Canadian currency hit especially hard and S&P futures sinking immediately.

With President Trump one never quite knows what one is going to get, so any assessment needs to be provisional. But that is a big part of the broader problem—high and persistent uncertainty about the basic rules of the game.

Like a game show host, Trump announced a series of tariff rates on many of America’s major trading partners.

How did he come up with the rates?