Charting the Largest Tariff Hike in Modern History

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Thanks for reading! If you haven’t subscribed, please click the button below:Subscribe nowBy subscribing you’ll join over 60,000 people who read Apricitas!Last week, Donald Trump announced the largest tariff package in modern American history—a 10% universal baseline tariff on imports from every country except Canada & Mexico plus additional country-specific tariffs that go as high as 40%. The 10% tariffs went into effect last Saturday, making for the largest single-day tariff hike in modern US history and bringing effective tariff rates to the highest level in nearly a century. Those additional country-level tariffs came into force three days ago, completely shattering the record set just a few days before, but were immediately paused when financial markets puked in response to their implementation.Trump claimed those now-paused country-level tariffs were “reciprocal” and that the US is only hitting back at other nations’ tariffs and trade barriers, but that was a blatant lie—the numbers justifying these tariffs were fabricated from calculations based on the US bilateral goods trade deficit. Free-trade zealot Switzerland got a higher “reciprocal” tariff than heavy-tariff-user Argentina simply because America’s trade deficit with Switzerland is larger than with Argentina. More importantly, several of the largest American trading partners got hit with massive tariffs—Vietnam got 46%, Taiwan got 32%, South Korea got 25%, Japan got 24%, and the EU got 20%—before the pause went into effect. Imports from China, already hit by 20% universal tariffs plus the preexisting tariffs fr…