US President Donald Trump’s new global tariff regime, due to be unveiled on April 2, seems very like Alice in Wonderland’s famously disappearing Cheshire Cat, which sometimes evaporated to nothing more than a cryptic smile and took great pleasure in misleading Alice.
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I sense that even on April 2 we will be left with more questions than answers. Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent attempted this week to clarify what to expect. He said the United States would produce a list of other countries’ tariffs: “We are going to go to them and say, ‘Look, here is where we think the tariff levels are, non-tariff barriers, currency manipulation, unfair funding, labour suppression, and if you will stop this, we will not put up the tariff wall.”
And if a country doesn’t change those policies, “then we will put up the tariff wall to protect our economy, protect our workers, and protect our industries”. I can see the Cheshire Cat smile even now.
He identified a “Dirty 15” – the 15 per cent of economies around the world believed to maintain the highest tariff walls against the US – noting these would be the priority target for April’s reciprocal tariffs.
If this list is based on those with whom the US runs the largest trade deficits, it would start with China, Mexico and Vietnam, and continue with Ireland, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Thailand, India, Italy, Switzerland, Malaysia and Indonesia.
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But there’s the Cheshire Cat again: this list would purely measure their goods trade surpluses with the US. It takes no account of “non-tariff barriers, currency manipulation, unfair funding, labour suppression”. To my best knowledge, no metric exists that tries to quantify these factors and meld them with trade data. So Bessent’s comments seem set to obfuscate.