IMF says Trump's tariffs will be a drag on global economic growth

[dalton99a]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/04/22/trump-tariffs-imf-global-economy/

IMF says Trump’s tariffs will be a drag on global economic growth
Import taxes will hurt United States and its trading partners, according to fund experts.
April 22, 2025 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
By David J. Lynch

The global economy will slow sharply this year, weighed down by President Donald Trump’s imposition of the highest import taxes in more than a century and the cloud of uncertainty that has billowed in their wake, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

Global growth will downshift to an annual rate of 2.8 percent, half a percentage point lower than projected in January and a “significant slowdown,” the fund said. Only a tepid rebound to 3 percent growth is likely in 2026, leaving the world economy’s expanding for the next two years well below its long-run average of 3.7 percent, according to the fund. Progress on bringing inflation under control also will be hurt.

Trump’s double-barreled tariff plan — a 10 percent tax on nearly everything the United States imports each year plus significantly higher levies on goods from dozens of nations — will hurt the United States and its trading partners, the fund said.

But the slowdown will be particularly sharp for the U.S. economy, which will grow this year at an annual rate of 1.8 percent, one third lower than its January estimate and a full percentage point below last year’s mark, the fund said.

“The landscape has quickly changed,” said Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s chief economist. “We are entering a new era as the global economic system that has operated for the last 80 years is being reset.”

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[dutch777]

1. Who knew? Oh, everyone with a brain which leaves out Trump and his economic advisors.

The truly crazy thing is, had they had a plan and not got the cart before the horse they may have actually been able to achieve much more of what they wanted without all the negative effects. If they had put in place a plan to ease and expedite investment in new US manufacturing capability, spoke to the fact that tariffs would be a mechanism eventually but they would negotiate with countries first to try and avoid them and line up folks like Apple and others to plan reshoring key industry manufacturing they might have had something. That was clearly too slow and too logical for this clown car cabal- -- if they even could have logically thought their way to it.

Now, if I were a major corporate entity, I might give lip service to the notion that we might onshore more manufacturing, but knowing that Trump has the attention span of a gnat, we would slow walk any real investment or organizational change because any real change will take 4 or 5 years and Trump will be gone and why put any capital at risk when just words will do. Trump of course will declare victory on the thinnest of pretenses and promises and move on and other than the disruption caused by his chaotic approach, nothing will really change.