Trump launches a trade war

The US Tariff Act of 1930 shows unequivocally that nobody wins a trade war. It exacerbated the Great Depression and led to a tit-for-tat series of trade barriers that took the global economic system decades to unravel.

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Trump claims tariffs are a matter of national security
(Image credit: Copyright (c) 2018 Shutterstock. No use without permission.)

"Until last week, Donald Trump's bark on trade protectionism had proved a good deal worse than his bite," says Jeremy Warner in The Sunday Telegraph. It seems "we relaxed too soon". The US president has announced levies on aluminium and steel imports, which will now incur tariffs of 10% and 25% respectively.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.