04-04-2025
Trump's Dream of Tariff-Driven Factory Boom Ignores Labor Crunch
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President Donald Trump followed through this week on a sweeping tariff policy that's set to slap levies ranging from 10% to 50% on just about everything: Vietnam-made Nike Inc. footwear; electronics from Taiwan and South Korea; apparel from Cambodia; European wine and cheese — but also any goods that might theoretically come from the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands in the sub-Antartica Indian Ocean and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a tiny self-governing French archipelago off of Canada.
It's the most aggressive assault on free trade in a century and threatens to upend economies across the globe, with only Canadian and Mexican imports being spared additional across-the-board rates for now because those countries are engaged in their own battle over separate tariffs.
In theory, Trump is trying to force a revitalization of American manufacturing. The reality risks being quite different. It takes years to reorder supply chains and construct new factories, while Trump's import taxes are poised to spur almost immediate price increases, deepen a pullback in investment and weigh on global growth. In the wake of the tariff announcement, economists and market strategists have increasingly been sounding the alarm on the risk of a recession or worse, stagflation — a dangerous combination of rising prices, sluggish economic growth and high unemployment that limits the ability of the Federal Reserve to respond.
