Tarrifs

I was just sitting on my golden toilet the other day when I started to wonder what happened to Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" Tarrifs.  After a stock market meltdown in May and a recalibration of policy with reality .... It seems Donald has backed down from his original position of hitting everyone with like 25-50% and things have settled down now at 10->15% for most countries except those who are on the US Naughty Step like China, Iraq and Iran...

According to the Trump Administration's United States Trade Representative (USTR)  the tariffs "are calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners", aiming to "drive bilateral trade deficits to zero" which came as news to Australia which has a baseline tariff of 10% despite the US running a trade surplus.  

Reuters Reported on November 14th that Trump on Friday rolled back tariffs on over 200 food products, including coffee, beef, bananas and orange juice, in order to head off inflation and many tarrifs are not yet in full effect (see here).  Other factors such as the current orders looking like they may be struck down by the Supreme Court as executive overreach some time soon may be keeping a lid on things... and it's hard to get a full picture of the US economy because of the government shutdown a few months back but ... things don't seem to be as awful as predicted... partially because Trump has chickened out.  Although small businesses don't seem that happy...