President Donald Trump was expected to implement the largest set of new commercial barriers in generations on Wednesday. Folding the “Day of Liberation”, Trump has already announced his intention to impose tariffs on imported cars and auto parts, and suggested that new duties would be reciprocal with other nations and include tasks in specific sectors such as pharmaceutical products or computer chips.
Although Trump was chosen due to his perceived capacity to shake the economy, much of his electoral campaign also promised to impose tariffs.
The latter finally won, a reality that seems to have surprised economists, the business community and consumers, many of which are their own voters.
“When he faced the argument that Trump was talking greatly about tariffs, putting them in everything, the answer was” it will be the same as in 2016: he did not do it, “said Michael Straver, director of Economic Policy Studies of the American Enterprise Institute, a group of Pro-Company experts, NBC News said before Wednesday’s announcement.
Instead, Strain said: “What we have seen in the last two months is quite light in the traditional policies of the Republican and Heavy Party in Maga. Business leaders have been quite confused and disappointed with what happened so far.”
The effort of the rates has reached the attacks and beginnings, with proposals and reversions that occur in rapid succession. Approximately 24 hours before Wednesday’s announcement, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, acknowledged that Trump and his advisors were still “perfecting” the new policy.
As the deployment of Wednesday stuns, countries continued jockey to get ahead of new tasks. Vietnam and Israel indicated that they would relax the duties previously imposed on US assets, while leaders in Europe still had hope of negotiations.
However, the mere threat of tariffs has created a massive uncertainty in the economy, which causes values markets to be tanks while strangling the confidence of business and consumers. The Federal Reserve changed its highest inflation forecasts for this year and then assume that companies will respond to the highest tasks by increasing costs, many of which are probably transmitted to consumers in the form of higher prices for everything, from avocados to wood, cell phones, cars and more.
Although the president of the FED, Jerome Powell, said that there was the possibility that the inflationary impact of duties could end up being “transitory”, recent surveys have suggested that consumers believe that the impulse of price increases can only be accelerated.
Companies and consumers already say that they expect worse economic results as a result of tariffs. In the latest consumer confidence survey at the University of Michigan, the long -term inflation expectations of consumers had the largest increase of three months registered and are now in a maximum of 32 years.
The same survey found that two thirds of consumers expect unemployment to increase in the following year, the greatest participation since 2009.
“This trend reveals a key vulnerability to consumers, since strong labor and income markets have been the main source of strength that supports consumer spending in recent years,” he said.
Companies also expect, and are already experiencing, higher prices. An executive of the oil industry and the gas told the Federal Reserve of Dallas in a survey published last month that the tariff threats of the administration “immediately increased the cost of our housing and tubes by 25 percent”, while the desire of the administration to see that oil prices fall to $ 50 per barrel “has caused our company to reduce its capital expenses 2025 and 2026”.
“‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ does not work with $ 50 per barrel,” said the person.
Trump has given a lot of foundations for imposing commercial duties, from reliving the American industry to increasing income to stop the flow of fentanyl and undocumented people. Wednesday’s announcement is also a culmination of Trump’s long -term fixation by reverting the United States trade deficit; He has accused countries of “taking advantage of” the United States and “cheating.”
Even before Wednesday, Trump was already claiming success, arguing that private companies had committed more investments in the United States in two months than in the four years of the Biden Administration. While some companies have pledged spending in the United States, analysts have raised doubts about the scope of the concessions they have received from commercial partners in response to the threat of higher duties or pointed out that many of the investment commitments that they have promoted were already in process.
From the point of view of the economy, many experts say that Trump’s vision on how trade works is outdated at best. It is true that medium -adjusted medium -adjusted earnings experienced a period of stagnation relative at the end of the 1970s. And for men, medium -sized profits have been flat during the last 45 years.
But in the last 10 years, they have constantly increased for both sexes. And although the United States has a large commercial deficit, it remains a manufacturing power whose exports have never been more valuable even after adjusting inflation.
However, the Trump administration seems obsessed in an economic and nationalist worldview and is prepared to promulgate it, regardless of the final cost.
“The average salary in the service sector is higher than in the manufacturing sector,” Strain said. “We should not want to reallocate many workers with a higher payment in jobs that pay more than some nostalgia out of place for some imagined past. We should not want US workers to sew tennis shoes, they can have better jobs than that.”
