The Wall St. Journal reports what we already knew:
Americans, not foreigners, are bearing almost the entire cost of U.S. tariffs, according to new research that contradicts a key claim by President Trump and suggests he might have a weaker hand in a reemerging trade war with Europe.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that his historic tariffs, deployed aggressively over the past year as both a revenue-raising and foreign-policy tool, will be paid for by foreigners. Such assertions helped to reinforce the president’s bargaining power and encourage foreign governments to do deals with the U.S.
[…]
The new research, published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a well-regarded German think tank, suggests that the impact of tariffs is likely to show up over time in the form of higher U.S. consumer prices.
The findings don’t mean that the tariffs are a win for Europe—on the contrary. German exports to the U.S., which have rocketed in recent years, have contracted sharply in the past year.
The German research echoes recent reports by the Budget Lab at Yale and economists at Harvard Business School, finding that only a small fraction of the tariff costs were being borne by foreign producers.
We knew all that but I guess it has to be proven once again.
Trump is whining about having to pay the tariffs back to the US importers and manufacturers if the Supremes rule against his scheme. (It’s his mad money that he likes to use to buy whatever toys and people he wants to play with.) And, frankly, his henchmen already have other plans in place to use other authorities to continue to act like barbarians around the world dictating other countries’ policies with tariffs. So that may end up being meaningless.
But the ramifications of his batshit crazy behavior with threats of trade wars (and shooting wars) are going to bite in a big way. We may have seen that already today with the reaction of the markets and all kinds of investors from currency to bonds to long term interest rates. Perhaps they’ll all bounce back if Trump tacos again, but I have to wonder if it isn’t finally sinking in (especially after the Venezuela and Greenland nonsense) that three more years of this lunacy is intolerable. The party is being ruined by a big, orange bully who insists on beating he shit out of everything just because he can.