by Steve Timmer

Apr 3, 2025, 9:00 PM

Long, long time ago

But I can still remember

I have studied international trade virtually all of my career as a lawyer, stretching back to at least 1977, including a focus on the U.S. – Canada Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement (I was having dinner with a lawyer from Mexico City in a Minneapolis restaurant the evening that the NAFTA passed in Congress in 1993), and United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Even so, I don’t consider myself an expert. But you can believe me when I tell you that that customs and tariffs are very complicated and technical.

When Trump & Co. cranked up the tariff frenzy and said that it was going to adopt tariffs that were reciprocal and aimed at the countries that were taking advantage of the Undone States, because of my background, I wondered how the administration could possibly study the import regimes of 160 plus [closer to 200, Ed.] countries and make a judgment, on short notice, about each one’s tariffs and non-tariff barriers that were unfair to the Unhinged States.

Naturally, it had no intention of doing that, and that became obvious on Liberation Day, April 2nd. The Trump administration missed it by one day.

As near as anybody can figure out, the Trump administration took every country that has a trade surplus with the Unserious States — which is almost everybody — and concluded that if you have a surplus, you must be treating the Unconscious States unfairly.

I guess AI can tell you who these countries are, but it cannot tell you what a thoroughgoing dumb shit idea it is to make trade policy on this basis. For that you need sentient beings which the Trump administration obviously lacks. I called it fourth-grade thinking on Twitter, but somebody said that it was kindergarten thinking. I guess I was being kind.

Rather than targeting some real (or even perceived) unfairness in trading by specific states with the Unhappy States, the administration has engaged in simple ‘surplus targeting.’ If you have a trade surplus with the Uninformed States, you must be trading unfairly.

This is monumentally stupid.

The North American auto industry is already starting to lay off workers. Liberation Day Plus One.

The integrated auto industry relies on the USMCA’s rules of origin to move parts and assemblies freely across national boundaries without tariffs. Absent an agreement like the USMCA, every time goods cross a national border, they incur a tariff; an entry is like a bus ticket, good for only one trip. The same part could be dutied multiple times if it crosses the border multiple times as it is being manufactured into a car. The auto industry is an egg that cannot be unscrambled, not on the kind of notice the Trump administration has given, anyway.

Trump ignores the trade agreements we have made: the USMCA, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the GATT), and the list goes on. At this point, anybody who relies on the Unreliable States for anything is a fool.

* * *

Update 4/5: Some economists I listen to and read have made some interesting observations. One of them is that it is impossible to to balance bilateral trade with many countries, and we shouldn’t want to. Madagascar, for example, is a poor country, but it exports a lot of vanilla beans. On the other hand, it has little use for, and can’t afford, most of the high end stuff we export. Because we have a lot of cooks and bakers who like real vanilla and vanilla beans, we have a trade deficit with Madagascar. The new tariff rate for Madagascar under the Trump delusional tariff regime is 47%.

Related is the fact that import substitution is impossible in many cases. Bananas, lots of other produce in the winter, and coffee can’t be grown or harvested in the U.S. The tariffs won’t bring home — or even create in the short, medium, or long term — jobs. There are many other examples. There will be U.S. jobs lost in port handling, transportation, processing, distribution, and retailing, however.

Finally, if you are wondering how the Heard and McDonald Islands got a tariff rate when only penguins live there (and by all accounts, the penguins have become very nationalistic, just like the Canadians), apparently the bright lights who put the tariffs together used top level domains to organize their work.

‘LLM’ refers to large language models, or AI.

Update 4/6: And the hits keep rolling in. This is, in fact, the raison d’être for Trump’s tariff regime.

Critical trade theory

Update 4/11: I’ve read reporting that USMCA goods won’t be subject to the general tariff rate applied to Canada. If true, the auto industry appears to be spared, mostly.