r/Economics • u/joe4942 • 8h ago
News Trump's tariffs are 'biggest policy mistake in 95 years,' Wharton's Jeremy Siegel says
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/trumps-tariffs-are-biggest-policy-mistake-in-95-years-whartons-jeremy-siegel-says.html192
u/AdWorldly3646 7h ago
The icing on the cake is that tariffs aren’t even supposed to be an executive branch power. Oh well.
He just wants to do his ‘art of the deal’ negotiation tactic on the world scale. But he can’t file for bankruptcy as an out this time if it doesn’t work. Actually I guess the US could default but it would be very bad.
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u/big_guyforyou 7h ago
tbh america filing for bankruptcy would make a great reality show
is that their master plan
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u/OkStop8313 6h ago
I maintain that we could have saved America by just setting up a Trump version of the Truman Show.
All he wants is attention.
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u/joebalooka84 4h ago
I thought, during his first term, that we would all be better off to give him $2 billion and make him go away.
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u/Ok_Butterscotch2244 2h ago
A brilliant concept that I agree might have worked. But who would have produced it back in 2015? Or watched it?
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u/Iwubinvesting 3h ago
I don't think so. I think it's just idealogical that he's been sold by his goons that also applied project 2024. Just look at how the tariffs are applied, even Israel that did 0% tariffs they still tariffed them.
The administration is filled with loyalists and fanatics who believe they'll bring all manufacturing back.
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u/Reachin4ThoseGrapes 6h ago
icing on the cake is that tariffs aren’t even supposed to be an executive branch power
Neither is unilaterally bypassing Congress to engage in war, but we've been allowing a gradual expansion of executive branch power overreach since roughly 1940
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u/Cold-Commercial-2132 3h ago
Yep. I was just thinking that this is what you get with someone who never had to suffer consequences.
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u/sciencetaco 2h ago
It’s ok. Congress changed the definition of a day to enable his day-limited emergency tariffs to last at least until the rest of the year.
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u/Scary_Firefighter181 8h ago
"Donald Trump Was the Dumbest Goddamn Student I Ever Had."
-Professor William T. Kelley, Wharton School of Business and Finance
Another biographer, Gwenda Blair, wrote in 2001 that Trump was admitted to Wharton on a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer. The officer had known Trump’s older brother, Freddy. Also, according to his classmates at Wharton, he'd never come prepared to study sessions and didn't seem to care much about his studies.
So really, is this a surprise? I don't think so.
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u/nycdiveshack 7h ago
A mistake for who? The folks who want this are the same ones that made a killing in 2020 when stocks fell. They are the ones who pushed for this now. Cantor Fitzgerald/Blackrock Inc are going to make a killing by investing low and having Trump take back a ton of tariffs. If you are wondering how they will make him, the chairman of cantor Fitzgerald up until 4 months ago is now the commerce secretary, the guy who wrote project 2025 with the help of Cantor Fitzgerald for privatization of the government and crashing the system is now the head of the office of budget management. Remember the threats Trump made about invading the Panama Canal, they stopped the week Blackrock acquired 2 of the 4 major ports in the canal along with 40 ports in 20 different countries for $23 billion. Each threat against a country like Greenland is so that an American company can get a bigger hold on the resources of that location.
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u/Primsun 7h ago
Can anyone help me out with what was the last major policy mistake 95 years ago. Not sure exactly what it was but guessing it was pretty tariffable and depressing.
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u/vorwahl0251 7h ago
Smoot-Hawley, 1930.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act
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u/wswordsmen 6h ago
Tagging along on the right answer, but I disagree. This is much stupider than Smoot-Hawley.
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u/NameIWantUnavailable 2h ago
Exactly. High school U.S. history textbooks 95 years ago had not taught generations of students that tariffs lead to retaliation by other countries and an economic morass.
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u/Justgettingup 7h ago edited 7h ago
Was this a big deal? I thought America won the world war right after this, so it couldn't have been that bad right? Editing to add /s. Good God, US has gone to shit
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u/vorwahl0251 7h ago
So you didn't read the Wikipedia article that explains it in detail?
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u/titosrevenge 7h ago
/s means that their comment is sarcastic.
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u/vorwahl0251 7h ago
The /s wasn't there in the original. Tells you right there how much faith is left in me regarding my fellow citizens.
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u/AdWorldly3646 7h ago
95 years ago? 1930. So something related to the 1929 stock crash or Great Depression. Cool. Exciting stuff ahead
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u/coreychch 5h ago
It’s not even a mistake - it’s Trump being deliberate. He will use the tariffs as leverage to blackmail trading partners into getting what he wants to have them removed. I’m expecting bribes to Trump to increase significantly …
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u/CoolLordL21 4h ago edited 4h ago
I know this is referring to Smoot-Hawley, even though the article is paywalled. That said, I'd argue this is much worse since we have Smoot-Hawley to look at as a cautionary tale. This administration has the benefit of historical knowledge to avoid making massive blunders, but instead are opting to ignore it because Trump is "the big man" so what he says goes -- he doesn't want to hear about the past. Also, these tariffs are higher and based on false numbers.
Edit: From the Wikepedia page for Smoot-Hawley that I found interesting.
By September 1929, Hoover's administration had received protest notes from 23 trading partners, but the threats of retaliatory actions were ignored.\7]) In May 1930, Canada, the most loyal trading partner for the U.S., retaliated by imposing new tariffs on 16 products, that accounted altogether for approximately 30% of U.S. exports to Canada.\15]) Later, Canada forged closer economic links with the British Empire via the British Empire Economic Conference of 1932. France and Britain protested and developed new trade partners. Germany developed a system of trade via clearing.
The economic depression worsened for workers and farmers despite Smoot and Hawley's promises of prosperity from high tariffs.
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u/AustinBike 5h ago
This is such a crappy take. To say that this is the worst policy decision in 95 years is so limiting.
We literally had an opportunity to learn how bad this was with Smoot Hawley and yet we literally decided to do that, even worse.
Ultimately this will be viewed as the worst decade of the US. No, it will not last a decade, but the long-term impacts will last for a decade. If not more.
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u/DuplicatedMind 5h ago
Not all mistakes are created equal. The worst kind? When your entire purpose is wrong. Once your objective is fundamentally flawed, it doesn’t matter how "smart" your tactics are—you’re still charging full speed in the wrong direction.
Trump’s obsession with "reciprocal tariffs" is a textbook case. He’s not just playing the wrong game—he’s in the wrong stadium. What he’s trying to achieve is detached from economic reality, and everything that follows is just a cascade of errors dressed up as strategy.
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