On the matter of President Trump’s imposition of a 25 per cent tariff on US imports of steel and 10 per cent on aluminium, I cannot improve on the comments of the sage of Washington, the former Bank of England monetary policy committee member Adam Posen, who called it ‘straight-up stupid’ and ‘fundamentally incompetent, corrupt or misguided’. Indeed virtually all economically literate opinion was united in condemning a move which will hurt America’s steel-producing allies in Europe and South Korea without seriously impeding China’s advance, and will surely provoke a salvo of protectionist responses — contributing to a slowdown of global cross-border trade and investment that has been a visible trend since the beginning of this decade.
It’s the kind of bone-headed blue-collar populism embraced by the former Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca in the 1980s when he was briefly touted as a presidential candidate and compared himself to the revolutionary patriot Paul Revere: ‘I’m the only guy on a goddamn horse saying “The Japanese are coming, the Japanese are coming”… And it’s all the fault of the dumb sonofabitch who allowed them into our market free of charge.’
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