Charting the Largest Tariff Hike in Modern History

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Last week, Donald Trump announced the largest tariff package in modern American history—a 10% universal baseline tariff on imports from every country except Canada & Mexico plus additional country-specific tariffs that go as high as 40%. The 10% tariffs went into effect last Saturday, making for the largest single-day tariff hike in modern US history and bringing effective tariff rates to the highest level in nearly a century. Those additional country-level tariffs came into force three days ago, completely shattering the record set just a few days before, but were immediately paused when financial markets puked in response to their implementation.

Trump claimed those now-paused country-level tariffs were “reciprocal” and that the US is only hitting back at other nations’ tariffs and trade barriers, but that was a blatant lie—the numbers justifying these tariffs were fabricated from calculations based on the US bilateral goods trade deficit. Free-trade zealot Switzerland got a higher “reciprocal” tariff than heavy-tariff-user Argentina simply because America’s trade deficit with Switzerland is larger than with Argentina. More importantly, several of the largest American trading partners got hit with massive tariffs—Vietnam got 46%, Taiwan got 32%, South Korea got 25%, Japan got 24%, and the EU got 20%—before the pause went into effect. Imports from China, already hit by 20% universal tariffs plus the preexisting tariffs from Trump’s first-term trade war, got an additional 34% tariff.

That wasn’t the end of it—tariffs on China went up an additional 91% beyond the April 2nd tariff announcement after two successive rounds of retaliation, reaching 145% on most goods. This is the end of most direct trade between the world’s two largest economies—outside of the categories facing only 20% tariffs, it would almost always be more economical to source from any other country, produce domestically, or simply not buy goods outright than try to pay tariffs this high. In total, America has just blockaded itself from all overseas trade and completely severed the majority of US-China economic links in the single largest negative shock to global supply chains since the early pandemic.

Contextualizing the Tariff

It should go without saying that this is an insane way to run the world’s largest economy. Imagine being a US solar panel importer, panicking because most of your goods come from