tariffs

WASHINGTON — One year ago, Donald Trump stood in a sun-kissed, unpaved Rose Garden and defiantly announced a new era of global trade, raising tariffs on countries worldwide and sending shock waves through the global economy.

The president promised short-term pain rippling through American households would make way for a U.S. economy that would soon take off. But experts say they are still waiting for receipts — and question whether they will ever come.

A year of turbulence

Tariff rates shifted so unpredictably for so long — across countries and with remarkable speed — that companies are still struggling to build stable, long-term supply chains capable of supporting future planning and growth. U.S. markets recorded one of the most volatile years in history, marked by extreme swings and modest gains driven by a handful of stocks for tech companies largely inoculated from import duties.

A customer visits a Costco food court in San Diego on March 18.

(Kevin Carter / Getty Images)

Federal customs duties brought in tens of billions of dollars. But a study published this week by the European Central Bank found that U.S. importers and consumers, not foreign exporters, bore the brunt of the costs that paid for it — and that an even larger share of the burden will fall on American households and companies the longer Trump’s tariff policies stay in place.

Despite the president’s pronouncements, tariff earnings have barely made a dent in the federal debt.

Tax cuts and additional spending on defense and immigration enforcement have increased the annual deficit. In the months of January and February alone, net customs duties hit an average of $27 billion — a significant figure that has essentially offset the costs of Trump’s war with Iran, now estimated to be more than $57 billion since its start.

In February, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had exceeded his authority by bypassing Congress to impose tariffs on an emergency basis. But the decision has merely prompted the Trump administration to look for ways to bypass the high court, as well.

“Even after the court ruling, the Trump administration continues to wield tariffs in a haphazard and ill-conceived fashion,” said Kimberly Clausing, a professor of tax policy and law at UCLA School of Law. “One year in, Trump’s tariffs have only generated higher prices, economic disruption, frayed alliances, and manufacturing job loss.”

Farmers in New Delhi take part in a March 19 protest demanding a minimum support price for crops.

(Sajjad Hussain / AFP / Getty Images)

Since the court ruling, Trump has moved away from using broad emergency powers to justify tariff rates, now citing laws on national security and unfair trade practices to keep them in place. Those are being challenged, as well.

“Trump’s tariff mania injected uncertainty into global business supply chains that he is refusing to let the Supreme Court undo,” said Aaron Klein, chair of economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

“It would be one thing if Trump replaced the existing tariff system with a coherent strategy approved by the very Republican Congress he controls,” Klein added. “Instead, Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff by tweet and let the courts figure it out months later destroys business’ ability to plan and undermines global confidence in America’s trustworthiness.”

‘Mounting downside’

Whether or not the president’s tariff policies survive, they have succeeded in ushering in a new era of international trade, shifting global reliance on the U.S. dollar and on the American consumer market, experts said.

“The euro, the Chinese yuan and crypto will be the biggest beneficiaries as the dollar loses market share,” said Kenneth Rogoff, an economist and professor at Harvard. “Future historians may well look back some day and see Liberation Day as marking the beginning of the end of the dollar’s absolute dominance in global markets, and the ‘exorbitant privilege’ it has given to the United States as issuer of what once upon a time was the world safest currency.”

Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that Trump’s tariff policies have upended global shipping, prompted China to increase offshore investments in countries like Vietnam to process Chinese inputs for the U.S. market, and elevated long-term uncertainty over investing in North America — a trifecta that has ensured that U.S. companies and consumers bear the costs.

“While the president promised an American ‘industrial renaissance,’ manufacturing jobs have been lost every month since early 2023,” Lovely said. “Easy to see the mounting downside of his tariff barrage, hard to find much upside.”

More than 100,000 net jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector have been lost over the last year, in part due to the increased costs facing U.S.-based manufacturing companies for parts and inputs, said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

That has made domestic manufacturing less competitive. “The trade war has also increased the prices facing consumers at a time when affordability is their top concern,” Strain added.

Customers shop at the Sanya International Duty Free City in Sanya, in south China’s Hainan province, on Jan. 10. In December 2025, China launched special customs operations in the Hainan Free Trade Port, allowing easier entry of overseas goods and expanding zero-tariff coverage.

(Guo Cheng / Xinhua / Getty Images)

The policy has become a political albatross for the president, who now proceeds through a midterm year with a bipartisan majority of Americans dissatisfied with his approach to their top concern. Seven in 10 Americans believe that tariffs have increased their costs of living, according to a recent poll, including 64% of Republicans and 67% of independents.

Sung Won Sohn, a former commissioner at the Port of Los Angeles, said that inflation aggravated by Trump’s tariff actions has complicated policy at the Federal Reserve, fueling uncertainty in the U.S. stock market.

The Supreme Court’s decision, which prompted legal ambiguity on the administration’s path forward and opened the door to a flood of litigation for potential tariff refunds, further added to uncertainty. “The net result is decreased economic efficiency,” Sohn said.

Trump faces worse poll numbers on inflation than former Presidents Carter and Biden, both of whom faced challenges with increased prices on goods. Today, 72% of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of rising prices, according to a CNN poll released this week.

“The real damage from the tariffs — and their uneven unwinding — is not captured in headline GDP figures,” Sohn added. “It shows up in slower decision-making, reduced productivity, and a persistent fog over the economic outlook.”

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On a personal note, hats off to my colleagues for stepping in during my parental leave — it’s great to be back.

More to come,
Michael Wilner

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Published on
27/03/2026 – 12:15 GMT+1

The EU approved a sweeping customs reform to handle growing trade volumes and streamline the application of its standards.

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The agreement, which was reached on Thursday evening, introduces new tools to improve the collection of customs duties and increase controls on non-compliant or unsafe goods, without imposing excessive burdens for authorities and traders.

“Today’s agreement marks the greatest reform since the creation of the Customs Union in 1968”, Cypriot Finance Minister Makis Keravnos said in a statement following the adoption of the reform. “This modern toolbox will facilitate trade and ensure the proper collection of duties, in a simplified manner, and with the required legal certainty”, the minister added.

Customs management and trade have gained renewed urgency after trade volumes have sharply increased in the last years. Some €4.6 billion low-value items under €150 were imported to the EU in 2024, representing an average of 12 million parcels per day, according to European Commission data. That is a major increase from the €2.3 billion that entered in 2023 and €1.4 billion in 2022.

In addition, uncertainties over US tariffs, combined with new EU trade deals such as those with MERCOSUR and Australia, make this reform particularly timely.

EU customs data hub

The new rules foresee the creation of an EU customs data hub, which will be an online platform to facilitate the monitoring of trade flows without disrupting their smooth operation.

Businesses importing and exporting from the EU will only need to submit customs information on that single portal.

The hub, which will be operational for e-commerce from July 2028, will be managed by a new European Custom Authority, headquartered in Lille, France.

The Authority will oversee the EU customs by coordinating national offices and supporting them in the risk management. In particular, the Authority will analyse the import and export data to flag cargos that poses the highest risk for inspection.

The reform will also introduce simplified procedures for “trust and check traders” for transparent businesses that will not be subjected to active customs interventions.

For e-commerce operators that fail to comply with EU standards, it will be applied a new system of financial penalties.

The reform foresees a new EU handling fee for small parcels entering the EU starting November 2026, with the exact amount to be decided by the European Commission. From July to November, a temporary €3 tax will apply to all parcels under €150.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is stepping up its ambitious effort to replace about $1.6 trillion in lost tariff revenue that was eliminated by the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a range of the president’s import taxes.

Recovering that lost revenue, which the White House was counting on to help offset the steep, multitrillion-dollar cost of its tax cuts, is possible but will be challenging, experts say. The administration has to use different legal provisions to impose new import taxes, and those provisions require longer, complex processes that U.S. companies can use to seek exemptions. It could be months or more before it is clear how much revenue the replacement tariffs will yield.

“I wouldn’t bet against this administration being able to get back on paper the same effective tariff rate they had before,” said Elena Patel, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. But the new approach will “make it easier for people to contest the tariffs, which is going to put a big asterisk on the revenue until all that is settled.”

On Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the administration will investigate 16 economies — including the European Union — over whether their governments are subsidizing excessive factory capacity in a way that disadvantages U.S. manufacturing. The investigation will also cover China, South Korea and Japan, Greer said.

In addition, he said, there would be a second investigation of dozens of countries to see whether their failure to ban goods made by forced labor amounts to an unfair trade practice that harms the United States. That investigation will also cover the EU and China, as well as Mexico, Canada, Australia and Brazil.

Both investigations are being conducted under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which requires the administration to consult with the targeted countries, as well as hold public hearings and allow affected U.S. industries to comment. A hearing as part of the factory capacity investigation will be held May 5, while a hearing on the forced labor investigation will occur April 28.

It’s a far cry from the emergency law that President Trump relied on in his first year in office, which allowed him to immediately impose tariffs on any country, at nearly any level, simply by issuing an executive order.

Moments after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Trump imposed a 10% tariff on all imports under a separate legal authority, but that duty can only last for 150 days. The president has said he would raise it to 15%, the maximum allowed, but has yet to do so. Some two dozen states have already challenged the new taxes. The administration is aiming to complete its Section 301 investigations before the 10% duties expire.

The effort underscores the importance that the Trump White House has placed on tariffs as a revenue-raiser at a time when the federal government is facing huge annual budget deficits for decades into the future. Previous administrations, by contrast, used tariffs more sparingly to narrowly protect specific industries.

Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, noted that the first investigation covers roughly 70% of imports, while the second would cover nearly all of them.

“That breadth suggests the goal isn’t to address the issues at hand, but instead to re-create a sweeping tariff tool,” she said.

Trump portrays tariffs as a way to force foreign countries to essentially help pay the cost of U.S. government services, even though all recent economic studies find that American companies and consumers are paying the duties, including analyses by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and economists at Harvard University. In his State of the Union address last month, Trump even touted his tariffs as a potential replacement for the income tax, which would return the United States’ tax regime to the late 19th century.

Trump also wants tariffs to help pay for the tax cuts he extended in key legislation last year. The tax cut legislation is expected, according to the most recent estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, to add $4.7 trillion to the national debt over a decade, while all Trump’s import taxes, including ones not struck down by the court, were projected to offset about $3 trillion — or two-thirds of that cost.

The high court’s ruling Feb. 20 that he could no longer impose emergency tariffs eliminated about $1.6 trillion in expected revenue over the next decade, according to the CBO.

Some of Trump’s import taxes remain place, including previous tariffs on China and Canada that were imposed after earlier 301 investigations. The administration has also imposed tariffs on some specific products, including steel, lumber and cars. Those, combined with the 10% tariff for part of this year, should yield about $668 billion over the next decade, the Tax Foundation estimates.

“It’s going to take a really big patchwork of these other investigations to make up for the [lost] tariffs,” York said.

The administration’s efforts are also unusual because they reflect an overreliance on tariffs to bring in more government revenue. Trump has also said the import taxes are intended to return manufacturing to the United States — manufacturing jobs, however, are down since he returned to office — and he has used the tariffs to leverage trade deals.

“What makes this really different,” said Kent Smetters, executive director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, “it is really the first time tariffs have been mainly used as a revenue raiser.”

Patel, meanwhile, argues that raising revenue can be done more reliably and straightforwardly by Congress. Laws like Section 301 are traditionally intended to be used to address specific trade policy concerns in particular countries.

“It’s not supposed to be there to raise revenue,” she said. “If we want to raise revenue through tariffs, then Congress should impose a broad based tariff.”

Rugaber writes for the Associated Press.

EU lawmakers in Brussels are worried that the bloc is drifting into the crosshairs of US domestic politics, as the White House launched new trade investigations into EU goods accusing the European Union is “implementing close to zero” of trade commitments.

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Next week could prove decisive for the EU–US trade deal struck last summer.

Washington has stepped up pressure on the EU in recent days to implement the agreement cut last summer cut between the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and President Donald Trump, tripling tariffs on the EU.

Still, MEPs have kept the implementation process, which also includes investment pledges from the Europeans in the US, frozen, seeking clarity after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in February that US tariffs imposed in 2025 were illegal.

The fate of the deal remains uncertain after the White House launched new investigations into EU products this week that could lead to tariffs exceeding the 15% ceiling agreed under the pact.

“It is domestic politics and the worst-case scenario has happened: we got involved,” Croatian MEP Željana Zovko, lead negotiator for the European People’s Party, told Euronews.

She added: “We were waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision but now of course this administration will do its utmost to do it its own way.”

In the days following the court’s ruling, the US administration has looked for new legal grounds for tariffs and invoked Section 122 to impose fresh duties of 10% on EU goods, on top of the 4.8% tariffs already in place under most-favored nation regime.

The provision allows temporary duties for a maximum of 150 days, after which the US Congress would need to agree an extension. The Supreme Court suggested in its initial ruling that the President had exceeded his powers under emergency grounds.

As Washington looks for a way to make the tariff salvo permanent, it is also increasing the pressure on allies by opening new investigations into trading partners including the EU over alleged unfair trade practices. China and India were also targeted.

The probes could pave the way for tariffs above the 15% ceiling agreed in the deal struck in July 2025 by Ursula von der Leyen and Donald Trump in Turnberry, Scotland.

Next week will be pivotal for the EU-US deal

“Now uncertainty is increasing even more for our businesses,” Zovko said.

Since the court ruling, the EU has sought clarity from Washington on whether the Turnberry agreement signed last year still stands or has been broken.

US officials assured EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič they would stick to the deal, though they have not detailed how the 10% tariffs after the court ruling will be replaced in the long-term. In return, the US expects the EU to implement the agreement fully and quickly.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer raised the temperature on Wednesday, lashing at the Europeans on the basis that “the EU has done approximately zero percent of what they were supposed to do for their trade deal with us.”

This week’s investigations should be taken seriously, German MEP Bernd Lange (S&D) told Euronews, despite the erratic moves by the US administration since the court ruling.

“Section 301 will allow the US to differentiate between countries and therefore add pressure to each of them,” he said.

Next week could be pivotal for the EU–US trade deal.

Italian MEP Brando Benifei (S&D) will travel to Washington hoping to meet Greer. He may be joined by Lange, the chair of the EU trade committee, on Monday although a decision has not been made yet.

The trip comes as negotiators in the European Parliament must decide whether to resume work on the agreement or postpone the vote once more. A vote is required to cut EU duties on US goods to zero, as foreseen in the Turnberry deal.

But political groups remain divided.

“When I read what the socialists are saying, I’m losing hope that we will have a vote, despite reassurance given by Iratxe García Pérez [Spanish MEP, chair of the S&D] and Bernd Lange,” a source at the EPP told Euronews.

Benifei said the EU needs a clear political signal from Washington that it will stick to the deal, otherwise “there is no way we can vote on the file.”