http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ ... story.html
Trump insists 'trade wars are good, and easy to win' after vowing new tariffs
President Donald Trump on Friday declared a global trade war and said it would be "easy to win," promising to hammer "reciprocal taxes" on any country that charges tariffs on U.S. goods and services.
His threats, made in a series of Twitter posts, looked to escalate his new protectionist policies far beyond the steel and aluminum tariffs he said he would impose next week. Instead, he vowed to impose trade restrictions on any country that he felt had an unfair trade relationship with the United States, following through on nationalist threats that many aides had spent more than one year trying to contain.
Trump tweeted: When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore-we win big. It's easy!
Over the past 24 hours, Trump has drawn the blueprints for the most protectionist U.S. trade policy in roughly 100 years. The White House has provided no information or details about how these trade practices would go into effect. Instead, they've been sketched out in rough terms in off-the-cuff remarks after a meeting with steel and aluminum executives and in a series of social media posts that many trade experts said grossly misrepresented how trade works.
Eswar Prasad, professor of trade at Cornell University, said Trump's embrace of broad and stiff import restrictions had little precedent in the past 100 years. He said Trump could succeed in limiting U.S. imports but it could come at the cost of limiting U.S. exports, hurting growth and trade around the world.
"What we have seen in the last 24 hours is something much, much broader, and could escalate into very high levels of tariffs that affect a lot of trading partners," he said. "There is no immediate historical precedent to this."
Many Republicans on Capitol Hill have expressed alarm at Trump's sudden insistence on broad steel and aluminum tariffs and have frantically tried to get Trump to back away from his vow. Foreign leaders, meanwhile, have responded swiftly, saying they will retaliate with tariffs of their own meant to inflict economic pain on U.S. industries, some of which happen to be in politically sensitive parts of the country.
Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, said the European Union was preparing retaliatory tariffs against Harley Davidson motorcycles, Levi's blue jeans, and Kentucky bourbon, a move that could enrage Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Canadian officials said the steel and aluminum tariffs would be unacceptable and that they would retaliate if it affected their exports to the United States. A number of other countries also expressed alarm. German politician Bernd Lange, who heads the trade committee at the European Parliament, shot back: "With this, the declaration of war has arrived."
If Trump actually follows through on this, (And he very well may not...this "announcement" has all the hallmarks of a desperate attempt to shift the news media attention away from the avalanche of bad Russiagate related developments Trump was buried under this week, as well as being more rhetorical red meat tossed to his nativist know-nothing base.) they should be popping the champagne corks at the DNC headquarters...
The one factor that has been pushing back against the dimensions of the coming Democratic wave in the mid-term elections has been the strength of the economy; nothing has the potential to tank the economy more quickly than a global trade war...
