WTO

When US President Donald Trump announced the imposition of “reciprocal” tariffs on virtually the entire globe on April 2nd, many observers felt that they were witnessing a historic event—the “end of globalization as we know it”, the starting shot to an economic calamity on the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic or, as the prime minister of Singapore put it, “a seismic change in the global order”. And it was indeed a momentous act: with the stroke of a pen, President Trump brought US tariffs up to a level last seen more than a hundred years ago, and higher even than the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 that is widely faulted for having deepened the Great Depression. The farcical way in which the new tariffs had been calculated—based on an misleading formula apparently suggested by ChatGPT—only added to the sense of bewilderment.   …