30-03-2025
Key details of Trump's tariffs remain uncertain days ahead of April 2
The Trump administration is preparing to roll out a slew of new tariffs on Washington's trading partners on April 2. But with just days to go until the new duties are supposed to take effect, key details, as well as what the tariffs are supposed to achieve, remain unclear to analysts, foreign governments, and lawmakers alike, while administration officials have also made several contradictory claims.
The result is a growing feeling of uncertainty over the trajectory of the American economy.
'I can't give you any forward-looking guidance on what's gonna happen this week,' White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Sunday. 'The president has got a heck of a lot of analysis before him, and he's gonna make the right choice I'm sure.'
Donald Trump has long touted tariffs as a way to push companies to invest more in the US and promote American businesses. He has also positioned them as a revenue source for the government, while some conservative lawmakers see them as a means to force other countries to grant concessions. 'Trump, for now at least, appears to be trying to demonstrate that tariffs can accomplish several goals simultaneously,' The Washington Post wrote. An economist with a center-right think tank, though, noted that 'several of these stated goals are in contradiction with each other… You can't have a tariff for everything and everyone — in time, they will have to reveal what the real purpose is.'
The questions swirling around the tariffs — from what goods they will affect to how governments and companies respond, to how prices will change — has permeated the economic ecosystem. Markets are bracing for volatility after April 2 while analysts have warned of high-level impacts: 'The uncertainty alone is going to drag on growth,' a Deutsche Bank economist said. In some communities where agriculture is the dominant industry, tariffs are the dominant topic of discussion, Minnesota paper The Mankato Free Press wrote. Fears range from a consumer spending slowdown to diminished exports. 'There is an uneasiness in the farm community because of the uncertainty,' one local farmer said. 'I'm sympathetic to the America First agenda… But I don't want it to become America Alone.'
Despite many analysts' fears that Donald Trump's tariffs will prompt the world's markets to put up their own barriers, 'Trump 2.0 will not be a fatal blow to international trade,' the Financial Times' Tej Parikh argued. The US is influential, but it alone can not reverse globalization; Europe and China are larger contributors to global trade growth, and a US retrenchment would only spur other countries to fill the gap, Parikh wrote. Asset manager PGIM defined the current moment as a 'dual-track era,' in which national security-related sectors are deglobalizing — for example, artificial intelligence, chips, minerals, military tech — but the less flashy goods and services sectors, which make up 75% of the global economy, are still globalizing at high speed.
