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      Trump announces sweeping new tariffs, upending decades of US trade policy

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      Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on some of its largest trading partners on Wednesday, upending decades of US trade policy and threatening to unleash a global trade war on what he has dubbed “liberation day”.Trump said he will impose a 10% universal tariff on all imported foreign goods in addition to “reciprocal tariffs” on a few dozen countries, charging additional duties onto countries that Trump claims have “cheated” America.The 10% universal tariff will go into effect on 5 April while the reciprocal tariffs will begin on 9 April.“This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history,” Trump said, in a long-winded speech on the White House lawn. For decades America had been “looted, pillaged and raped” by its trading partners, he said. “In many cases, the friend is worse than the foe.”Over the past few months, Trump has rattled global stock markets, alarmed corporate executives and economists, and triggered heated rows with the US’s largest trading partners by announcing and delaying plans to impose tariffs on foreign imports several times since taking office.But for the start of what appears to be a dramatic shift in American trade policy, one that could cause ricochets in the global economy, Trump tried to sell the tariffs with a celebratory tone.Nine giant US flags flanked Trump onstage in the Rose Garden, as the president spoke in front of his cabinet and a crowd of union workers wearing hard hats and fluorescent construction worker vests. Before Trump came onstage, a marine band played celebratory music to excite the crowd.At one point, Trump paused his speech to throw a Maga hat into the crowd. In the next breath, he announced the 10% universal baseline tariff.In the middle of his hour-long speech, the president displayed a chart that showed the “unfair” fees that countries placed on the US, alongside the new “USA Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs”. China charged the US 67% in “unfair” fees, and said the US would now levy a 34% fee. The EU charges 39% on imports, according to the White House, and will now be levied at 20%. Trump said the UK would be charged 10% – the baseline tariff – equal to the Trump administration’s calculations of the UK’s fees on US imports.Special exceptions were made for Canada and Mexico, though the countries were previously targets of proposed broad tariffs. The White House said that goods covered by an existing trade deal with Canada and Mexico will continue to see no tariffs.Trump said the tariff calculations also include “currency manipulation and trade barriers”, though the White House has not elaborated on how it calculated the new tariffs.It appears Trump has zeroed in on the industry-specific tariffs the countries have placed on American exports. In his speech, Trump criticized policies like the EU’s ban on imported chicken, Canadian tariffs on dairy and Japan’s levies on rice.Trump said the US would charge half of the fees he feels trading partners unfairly impose on the US because the US people are “very kind”. The countries have “placed massive tariffs on [US] products and created non-monetary tariffs to decimate our industries”, Trump said, calling them “common sense reciprocal tariffs”.“Reciprocal: that means they do it to us and we do it to them. Very simple, can’t get any more simple than that,” he said. “This indeed will be the golden age of America,” he said.Trump was ultimately following through with a promise he made during the election: on the campaign trail, Trump floated the idea of a 10% universal tariff on all imported goods.The new tariffs come on top of a lineup of levies that Trump has already implemented: an additional 20% tariff on all Chinese imports and a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports. There is also a 10% tariff on energy imports from Canada.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump also announced in March a 25% tariff on all imported vehicles and, eventually, imported auto parts, which will start going into effect on Thursday.“These tariffs are going to give us growth like you’ve never seen before, and it’ll be something very special to watch,” Trump said.Trump has made clear the goals he wants to accomplish through his tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US; respond to unfair trade policies from other countries; increase tax revenue; and incentivize crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking. But the implementation of his tariffs has so far have been haphazard, with multiple rollbacks and delays, and vague promises that have yet to come to fruitionBut the threats have soured US relations with its largest trading partners. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has called them “unjustified” and pledged to retaliate. The European Union has said it has a “strong plan” to retaliate. Other retaliatory tariffs could eventually lead to higher prices that would hurt American exporters.The US stock market closed slightly up on Wednesday, ahead of Trump’s announcement, with a slight boost from news that Elon Musk may step away from his role in the White House soon to focus on his businesses.Even with the slight upswing, two of the three major stock exchanges saw their worst quarter in over two years after Monday marked the end of the first quarter.In March, consumer confidence plunged to its lowest level in over four years. Polls have shown that tariffs are unpopular with Americans, including Republicans. Only 28% of people in a poll from Marquette Law School released Wednesday said that tariffs help the economy.The uncertainty around Trump’s tariff policies have increased the likelihood of a recession, according to recent forecasts from economists at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and other banks. More

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      Democrats still misunderstand working-class voters – to their peril | Dustin Guastella

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      Progressives have plenty of bad ideas that should be axed, but populism without an economic promise is a bloodless bleat.It wasn’t long ago that Democratic party moderates expressed ambivalence toward the working class. In 2016, Chuck Schumer summed up the party’s attitude by predicting that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia”.What a difference a decade makes. In a recent report titled Renewing the Democratic Party the thinktank Third Way warns: “For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class.” The policy shop even organized a meeting of heavy-weight Democratic party leaders to develop a new strategy for how they might win back the working class.Can moderate Democrats, plotting their path back to power in Loudoun county, Virginia (the richest county in the US), convincingly make a populist pivot?While Third Way’s advice, collected in a widely circulated memo, has some useful insights, more than anything it demonstrates establishment Democrats’ failure to understand the nature of working-class woes. In fact, the revival of populism, left and right, can be understood as a revolt against the world Third Way helped midwife. After all, they embraced an economic model – defined by free trade, deindustrialization, mass global migration and stagnant wages – that was responsible for the left’s breakup with the working class in the first place.Working-class culture clashThird Way’s first takeaway from the election is that Democrats are culturally disconnected from the working class. And they’re right. They advocate moving away from identity politics, insist that candidates use “plain language”, “avoid jargon”, reject “fringe positions” and eschew “overly moralistic or condescending messaging”. This makes sense. Yet newfound fears of identity politics, or the excessive influence of the foundation-funded non-profit left, reflect a certain amnesia. Moreover, turning the ship around is easier said than done.It’s no secret that sanctimonious political correctness, and preachy “social-justice” rhetoric have served as a major means to sideline progressive critics of the prevailing economic order. In fact, long before Hillary Clinton infamously wondered whether breaking up the big banks would “end racism”, her husband’s campaign architects – paradigmatic Third Way Democrats – pursued the same line of attack against critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). Those who didn’t want jobs shipped to the lowest-wage corners of the globe were labeled “racists”. It’s not a coincidence, then, that the rise of identity politics, and even “wokeness”, happened in tandem with the ascent of globalization as championed by Third Way adherents.As factories closed and millions of jobs were drained out of the US, the economic and social power of the working class fell into a steep decline. By the mid-1990s non-profits and thinktanks replaced labor unions as the major source of political influence on the left. With unions taking a backseat, politicking within the Democratic party took on a more elite character. Fights over slices of the economic pie shifted from the vertical axis – between labor and big business, between the rich and the poor – to the horizontal, between cross-class “groups”, unfailingly represented by well-staffed professional advocacy organizations.This all had the convenient effect of rendering blue-collar concerns practically invisible to elite Democrats. While trade, immigration and dissension over cultural issues have long appeared at the top of lists of concerns for non-college educated workers, Democrats wouldn’t listen. Instead they embraced liberal professionals as the vanguard of the New Democrat movement. Welcoming the influence of the Brahmin caste. Meanwhile, liberal cultural institutions (the media, the academy, the arts) increasingly applied downward pressure on blue-collar workers to embrace new values. That is, the values of the elite.Consider that, for the first half of this decade, there were wall-to-wall injunctions from the largest corporations in retail, tech and even finance – not to mention virtually all major media conglomerates – to embrace liberal identity politics, “diversity, equity and inclusion”, and cosmopolitan sexual ethics. Looked at in this light, today’s culture war can best be understood as a working-class revolt against the values of “knowledge economy” elites. It won’t be easy to make peace with the same elite still in charge.Resentment is richNor is it a coincidence why educational cleavages, in particular, play such a major role in cultural and political conflict today. While they were busy fashioning the “New Economy”, Third Way elites insisted that non-college educated workers refashion themselves to suit it. They implored everyone to go to college and learn to code to compete in the emerging high-tech hyper-global world. They were confident that the short-term pain of job losses would be rewarded with future gains. It hasn’t panned out. In terms of income, wealth and even life expectancy, blue-collar workers have found themselves lagging further and further behind their educated white-collar counterparts. Since 2000 wages for non-college educated workers have remained flat or actually fallen. For those with a college degree they have modestly increased. The earnings gap has grown wide.Meanwhile, none have benefitted from the contemporary economic and political arrangement as much as the wealthy. In inverse proportions have the rich profited alongside working-class decline. In 1990 – before Clinton signed Nafta, before Democrats presided over further deregulation of the financial sector, and before the dot-com boom – there were 66 billionaires in the United States. Just 10 years later – after gobs of factory jobs were off-shored – there were 298. A 350% increase. Today, there are more than 748.As a result, even Larry Summers (once a pre-eminent Third Way economist) has identified an “investment dearth” combined with a “savings glut” that has led to economic “secular stagnation”. In layman’s terms: the rich have all the money and they refuse to share. The billionaire hoarding of wealth means investment in the real economy is anemic. They sit like elephants on top of global growth rates. And because workers can’t spend wages they don’t have, effective demand stays flat.The Third Way left promised that the fire sale of public assets, the unshackling of big banks and the introduction of unfettered free trade would unleash unprecedented growth and a rising standard of living for American workers. It didn’t. Instead, it drove down wages and helped them transform their own party into a haven of the affluent and the educated.The paradoxes of pragmatic populismConfronting all this, Third Way now advocates that Democrats embrace a brand of pragmatic populism. They recognize the need to critique “corporate excess and corruption”, they counsel Democrats to avoid “dismissing economic anxieties” and instead acknowledge “real struggles like high prices and stagnant wages”. They even suggest that Democrats fight “for systemic reforms rather than just defending the status quo”.At the same time, they stress that Democrats are hurt by “reflexively attacking wealthy business leaders”. They warn against “vilifying the rich” and “demonizing” corporations. And insist that Democrats be pragmatic “pro-capitalist” reformers.They argue that candidates ought to own “the failures of Democratic governance” they don’t count among these, the broad failure of liberal economic policy to improve the lives of most voters. And while the authors of the memo are right to notice that “Democrats lack a cohesive, inspiring economic agenda”, they don’t offer any ideas for economic renewal. There is nothing about trade, manufacturing, the crisis of mass layoffs or the crumbling of American infrastructure. There is no discussion of jobs programs, labor market policies, overtime pay, or cost-of-living raises. The only mention of wages is to suggest that they ought to be “better”. Worse, Third Way’s insistence that candidates avoid blaming the corporations and the rich – the very group responsible for the broad economic and political crisis – presents a conundrum for would-be Democratic populists: how are they meant to make “the economy” a central talking point, if they don’t have anything to talk about?Blue-collar preferences do seem politically heterodox – progressive on wages and jobs, protectionist on trade, restrictive on immigration, moderate on culture and conservative on the deficit – and it can seem difficult to build a program to suit what seem like conflicting demands. But looked at another way these views add up to a fundamental break with the prevailing economic order. A call to shift society in favor of workers.Yet Third Way’s economic proposals – summed up by the demand for “middle-class tax cuts”– are a last gasp effort at preserving that order. Until, and unless, progressives can campaign in ways that address the root causes of workers’ cultural, social and economic concerns – that is, until the left can provide a compelling case for how to exit the global race to the bottom – the result will be a string of narrow majorities and narrow defeats.Each party taking their turn in office, neither providing a permanent home for the working class.

      Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623. More

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      Will Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ be the start of a trade war – or another climbdown?

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      Donald Trump won back the White House with a promise to transform the US economy. Millions of Americans, struggling with higher prices and bigger bills, elected a president who pledged to revive his country’s industrial heartlands – and leave the rest of the world to pick up the bill.On Wednesday – a day dubbed Liberation Day by the president and his aides – Trump has vowed to pull the trigger and impose an historic barrage of tariffs on goods from overseas he claims will fund an extraordinary revival.Ten weeks after obtaining power, Trump has said he will raise tariffs on all products from countries that charge tariffs on US exports; hit goods from Canada and Mexico with sweeping duties; introduce steep tariffs on foreign cars, computer chips and drugs; and target countries importing oil from Venezuela with duties on their US exports.This is “the big one”, according to the president. Business leaders and economists are certainly worried about the scale of his trade strategy, which the Tax Foundation already estimates could knock US gross domestic product (GDP) by roughly 0.7% and cost about 500,000 US jobs.“The escalating tariffs are a body blow to the global trading system,” said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University, and a former official at the International Monetary Fund.Wherever you stand, a move on this scale would constitute a radical shake-up – and set the stage for a fundamental overhaul of the US economy. And yet, even as he ramped up the rhetoric, Trump has appeared to tread carefully.“I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families,” the president declared at his inauguration in January. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”While the threats were immediate, the action was not.Take Canada and Mexico. The administration has adopted a strikingly hardline stance against the US’s largest and nearest trading partners, but its imposition of blanket tariffs has been hit by a dizzying array of shifting deadlines, delays and reversals.An initial pledge to impose tariffs from “day one” shifted, without explanation, to February. When February rolled around, a last-ditch deal kicked the can to March. When the tariffs were finally imposed, it was a little over 24 hours before carmakers were granted a temporary exemption, and 48 hours before all goods covered by an existing trade deal between the US, Mexico and Canada were spared for another month.All the while, Trump and his most senior officials have slowly, but surely, accepted the risks they are raising in pursuit of the rewards they have vowed to obtain.“Tariffs don’t cause inflation,” the president claimed in January. OK, prices “could go up somewhat short term”, he conceded in February. “There’ll be a little disturbance,” he added in March, stressing that he was alright with that.The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, acknowledged earlier this month that there may well be a “one-time price adjustment” as a result of Trump’s tariffs. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” he argued.While Trump predicts that slapping high US tariffs on foreign goods will prompt an influx of international companies to make products inside the US, rather than out, companies and investors worldwide are already struggling to keep up with his administration’s erratic trade policymaking.So far, since his return to office, Trump has hiked tariffs on Chinese exports to the US and raised tariffs on foreign steel and aluminium to 25%.The average US tariff rate has already shot up from 2.5% to 8.4% this year, the highest level since 1946, according to the Tax Foundation.Alex Durante, its senior economist, said the country is “inching towards” the kind of tariffs last seen since the 1930s, when the Smoot-Hawley bill, among the most decried pieces of legislation in US history, introduced tariffs on thousands of goods.“With each tariff action we’re rapidly approaching a universal tariff that would be damaging to the economy,” said Durante. “Behind the scenes, I think there is probably some concern, even among some of [Trump’s] staff, that they’re rapidly approaching the point of no return.”As his administration grappled with the fallout from the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about secret military plans last week, the president summoned reporters to the Oval Office to pre-announce tariffs on foreign cars. “This is very exciting,” he told them.The excitement is far from universal. Prasad, at Cornell, said: “We are shifting to a world where a commonly accepted set of rules is being displaced by unilateral actions that ostensibly promote a fair trading system, but will instead create volatility and uncertainty, inhibiting the free flow of goods and financial capital across national borders.”The car tariffs would be “a hurricane-like headwind to foreign (and many US) automakers”, said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, who suggested they would push up prices by as much as $10,000 in the US. “We continue to believe this is some form of negotiation and these tariffs could change by the week,” he added, “although this initial 25% tariff on autos from outside the US is almost an untenable head-scratching number for the US consumer”.Such action is also widely expected to prompt retaliation – with US exporters in the firing line.While a spokesperson for the European Commission stressed it was too early to detail the European Union’s response to actions “still not implemented” by the US, they added: “I can assure you that it will be timely, that it will be robust, that it will be well calibrated and that it will achieve the intended impact.”Trump is watching closely. As countries and markets hit by new US tariffs consider how to hit back, the president publicly warned the EU and Canada that he would hit them with “far larger” duties if they worked together on their response.Some doubt whether the federal government has enough capacity to execute the trade onslaught which Trump has said is coming. “I simply just don’t think that [the US Trade Representative] right now has enough staff to even figure out how to implement some of these tariffs,” said Durante.But after myriad false starts and much fluctuation, the lingering question – despite all the shots, warnings and vows – is not how far Trump can take his trade wars, but how far he will.The president is, at heart, a salesman. In business, he sold real estate – with mixed success. In television, and then politics, he sold stories – with extreme success.Millions of Americans bought the image he constructed on The Apprentice of himself as a phenomenally successful entrepreneur. Millions more bought his promise on the campaign trail to share this phenomenal success with the rest of the nation.Trump is no longer selling a promise, but his strategy to deliver it. He won the White House twice by using stories, sometimes unbound by truth, to bend perceptions, break norms and build support. But rhetoric – however bold, and brash – can’t change reality.The president says unleashing a wave of tariffs, and triggering an abrupt surge in costs in the US and across the world, would cause just a “little disturbance”.Should Wednesday’s action prove as drastic as billed, businesses and consumers may struggle to reconcile this description with what they encounter.Liberation Day is the moniker coined by this administration. Liability Day might prove more apt. More

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      Trump’s tariff obsession is a lose-lose proposition | Steven Greenhouse

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      I’ve been writing about manufacturing in the US since the 1980s, and it’s been heart-wrenching to report on dozens of factory closings and the devastation they have done to workers and communities. As the nation grasped for ways to slow these plant closings, I also wrote about Washington’s use of carefully employed trade measures, like targeted tariffs, and how they helped save some plants and jobs, especially in the steel industry.Carefully targeted tariffs can be a winning strategy, but Donald Trump’s obsession with tariffs – especially across-the-board ones that are neither careful nor targeted – has already shown itself to be a lose-lose strategy. Perhaps it’s too generous to use the word strategy to describe what the president is doing, because his tariffs seem based on fiat and whim, not on thoughtful planning.Trump is like Elmer Fudd with his shotgun, shooting every which way: Canada today, China tomorrow and perhaps Champagne country the day after, with tariffs imposed one day, suspended the next and then re-imposed a few days later, but, wait, those re-imposed tariffs might be canceled next week. It’s a “strategy” of chaos and capriciousness, with some viciousness thrown in.Obsessed as he is with tariffs, Trump calls tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented”, and “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. He talks as if tariffs will create an economic nirvana, but the opposite is happening. Stock markets are plummeting, corporate confidence is tanking, consumers fear higher prices and economists warn the measures might push the US into recession.Let’s count the ways Trump’s tariffs are a lose-lose proposition.First, at a time when Americans are feeling beaten and bruised from the pandemic-era burst of inflation, the tariffs – which are really a tax on imports – will inevitably push up prices. Trump’s tariffs will hit less affluent Americans hardest because they spend a higher percentage of their income on clothes and other imported goods. Many of those Americans voted for Trump, believing him when he said he’d reduce prices.Second, even though Trump boasts that tariffs will make American industry great again, it’s dubious whether Trump’s tariffs will do much to spur manufacturing. Trump has evidently forgotten that if you want to persuade corporations to build new factories – in this case, to bring back operations from overseas – then you need to reassure business executives that there will be economic and policy stability. But that’s the opposite of what Trump, the emperor of chaos, is all about. If you were a CEO, would you shell out $200m to build a new factory in the US in response to Trump’s tariffs when you know that Trump might lift those tariffs tomorrow or in two weeks or whenever a foreign leader flatters him or promises to let Eric and Don Jr build a Trump hotel at a beautiful seaside resort in their country?Trump is eager for hundreds of companies to build new factories in the US, but with his on-again-off again, here today-gone-tomorrow tariffs, he has made many stability-craving CEOs too scared to build new plants. Moreover, if Trump wants to attract the manufacturing industries and jobs of tomorrow, he’s been shooting himself and the US in the foot with his ideological war against the industries of the future, including electric vehicles, renewable energy and semiconductors. Trump is even threatening to kill Biden’s hugely successful subsidy program to build sophisticated new semiconductor plants in the US.Third, Trump’s tariffs are undermining economic growth; even Trump’s team has acknowledged the threat of recession. His tariffs are sabotaging supply chains, and that will disrupt production at many factories. His scattershot tariffs are so alarming companies that many are hesitating on plans to invest in new plant and equipment. That also undercuts growth. In addition, the widespread fears that tariffs will push inflation skyward have caused consumer sentiment to fall sharply. That could cause consumer spending, the major engine of the US economy, to decline.Fourth, Trump’s tariffs are hitting various U.S. industries hard. Trump’s hefty 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will hurt US auto makers by raising the cost of vital raw materials and making US-made cars less competitive vis-a-vis foreign automakers. Not only that, trade retaliation from Canada, Europe and China is already harming many US industries – including agriculture, motorcycles and Kentucky bourbon—and that, too, will push the economy toward recession. And let’s not forget that Trump’s tariffs are hurting the targeted countries, and that’s slowing their – and worldwide – economic growth.Fifth, another big way we lose is that Trump, by slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico and the European Union, has further angered and alienated many of our closest allies, and that comes on top of his disparaging Nato and increasingly allying the US with Russia. In this way, Trump may destroy the Atlantic Alliance, which has been pivotal for maintaining peace and prosperity, though not perfectly, since the second world war.Sixth, any honest, fair-minded cost-benefit analysis will show that Trump’s tariffs will cause far more damage than gain. Although Trump says his tariffs will “create jobs like we have never seen before”, economic studies have found that the tariffs Trump imposed in his first term failed to increase the number of jobs. Those tariffs created a small number of jobs in some industries, but retaliation and supply-chain disruptions caused job losses in other industries. A study by economists at MIT, the World Bank, Harvard and the University of Zurich concluded that Trump’s first-term tariffs “neither raised nor lowered US employment” and didn’t “provide economic help to the US heartland”.With Trump’s tariffs changing day to day, it’s impossible to predict how many jobs those tariffs will create or destroy. Thus far, his tariffs have caused US stock markets to lose $4tn in value, and those losses could grow. If Trump’s tariffs were to create 100,000 jobs, which some economists say is unrealistically optimistic, the cost would be an astronomical $40m per job ($4tn divided by 100,000). If his tariffs created 10,000 jobs, the cost would be $400m per job.With Trump’s tariffs slowing economic growth, if they result in a 1 percentage point drop in annual GDP, that would mean a loss of $300bn a year in economic output. (1% of the nation’s $30tn GDP). If Trump’s tariffs yielded 100,000 jobs, the cost would be $3m per job. Or if Trump’s tariffs raise inflation by 1%, that would cost American consumers roughly $200bn a year – which would mean a cost of $2m per job created.Returning to Elmer Fudd, his goal was always to shoot Bugs Bunny, but his gun often blew up in his face by mistake. With his tariffs, Elmer Trump seems well on his way to shooting the US economy by mistake.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Gold has surged amid economic uncertainty. Should you buy some?

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      As economic uncertainty roils the US, the price of gold has roared to record highs amid investors seeking a place to shield their cash from Donald Trump’s scattergun trade wars.A single ounce of gold cost $3,051.99 on Wednesday, compared with $2,160 in 2024, and gold has historically been seen as the safest place to invest in financially turbulent times.But the buying, and potentially hoarding, of gold need not be restricted to the Scrooge McDucks of this world. In 2025, gold can be bought from Walmart and Amazon – although experts say more established gold dealers are a better source.Once a person has bought the gold, they can do whatever they like with it: there are whole Reddit threads devoted to the best way to bury gold underground. (Dig a deep hole, dump your vacuum-sealed gold in the hole, put a layer of rocks on top of the gold so it can’t be discovered by a thief with a metal detector, then try not to forget where the gold is buried.)Experts suggest not burying the gold, however.“Gold is one of the few elements on the periodic table that does not decay or oxidize over time, so there’s no need to worry about deterioration,” said Alex Deluce, the host of the Gold Telegraph Show, and an expert in gold investment.“However, for safekeeping, store it in a secure location, ideally in a safety deposit box or a well-protected home safe. Keep it away from direct sunlight and heat sources to maintain its condition and security.”Deluce said gold should be purchased “from reputable suppliers who insure all deliveries”, and financial magazines including Forbes have lists devoted to gold-selling companies.To the uninitiated, an equally important question is: what kind of gold should people buy?Taylor Kenney, an economic journalist who works for ITM Trading, a gold and silver dealer based in Arizona, said most gold purchases are of bullion: gold that has been refined and shaped into coins or bars.Some of those bars are the big heavy type that is frequently stolen from banks in heist movies, but those tend to be very heavy, which means they are very expensive. Instead, many gold purchasers will be buying much smaller bars.A handy example was seen in the recent case of Bob Menendez, the now former Democratic senator who in January was sentenced to 11 years in prison for receiving bribes.Photos shared by the FBI showed that Menendez had an amazing a hoard of gold bullion in a variety of sizes: he had a couple of gold bars that weighed just one ounce.According to the United States Gold Bureau – which is not a government body, but instead a cleverly named private gold-trading company – the one-ounce bars are the most commonly traded around the world. Roughly the size of a US military dog tag, one-ounce bars were listed at Walmart for $3,122.10 on Friday, although anyone who has ever ordered and never received a table lamp from Walmart might want to try elsewhere.Menendez had also accumulated, through nefarious means, some one-kilo gold bars, each of which, at today’s prices, is worth just under $100,000.“Now is the perfect time to buy gold,” said Kenney.She said gold prices are rising “in response to inflation, geopolitical unrest and economic uncertainty”.Kenney added: “As dollar dominance is called into question, gold carries no counterparty risk and serves as a true store of wealth, unlike fiat currencies [such as the US dollar] that can be printed at will. The same reason central banks are buying gold is the same reason that average citizens should be buying gold as well.”Gina Miller, the founder of Moneyshe.com, is less convinced. She told CityAM that while gold has traditionally been viewed as a safe investment, “its track record reveals significant limitations as a long-term investment”.“For instance, while gold surged 148% from October 2008 to August 2011, it took nearly nine years, until July 2020, to reach new highs. Such prolonged stagnation makes it unappealing for investors seeking steady, long-term growth,” Miller said.With gold at record-high prices, it is unlikely that people will be able to buy the metal and flip it for quick returns. Instead, experts say, people should see gold as a small part of an investment portfolio, rather than pumping all their money into it and putting it in a big vault.As Trump shows no signs of backing down on his trade battles, having a few dog tags of gold stored in a safe space, or, if you’re Menendez, “jammed into jackets and boots”, might not be the worst option. More

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      Is Trump driving the US into a recession? – in charts

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      Prospects for the US economy have cooled significantly in a matter of months. After outperforming its international peers last year, warning lights are flashing on a dashboard of economic indicators as analysts warn that Donald Trump’s erratic approach is hitting the world’s largest economy.Fears of a US recession this year are growing, in what is being called a “Trumpcession”, amid a sharp decline in business and consumer confidence as the president threatens punitive import tariffs on US allies and enemies alike.Most economists reckon a recession – defined as two consecutive quarters of shrinking economic output – can be avoided. But it is clear there are storm clouds gathering within the president’s first 100 days back in the White House.GDPUS growth in gross domestic product (GDP) had outpaced international peers in recent years, and since the Covid pandemic in particular – helped by the Biden administration pumping billions of dollars into the economy through the Inflation Reduction Act. The former president did not get much credit, though, as voters felt the squeeze from the period of high inflation triggered by the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine.This week, the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow, which measures GDP economic growth in real time, suggested the US economy would contract at an annual rate of 2% in the first quarter. However, this widely followed indicator can be volatile, and it is heavily influenced by the US trade deficit, which soared in January.Trade balanceThe US goods trade gap surged to $153.3bn in January. This was driven by record import volumes, an increase of $36.2bn to $329.5bn in total, as US businesses rushed to bring shipments into the country to avoid potential tariffs.US gold importsA significant driver of the import rise was inbound shipments of “finished metal shapes”, which include bars of gold. The trend is also attributed to traders rushing to get ahead of potential US tariffs. A widening trade deficit would normally weigh on a country’s GDP, because imports are subtracted from the measurement. But because gold bought to sit in a vault is not consumed or used in production, it is excluded.This means the Atlanta Fed is likely to be overestimating the hit to first-quarter GDP. Still, there are other signs that the US economy is cooling.InflationTrump had promised to “bring prices down, starting on day one” and “cut energy costs in half within 12 months after taking office”.Official figures show the headline annual rate as measured by the consumer price index was 2.8% in February, after an unexpected rise to 3% in January from 2.9% in December. Energy costs are down by 0.2% on an annual basis.The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said on Monday that Trump’s trade wars risked stoking inflation. It increased its US inflation forecast for 2025 to 2.8%, up from a previous estimate of 2.1% made in December.EmploymentThe US jobs market has boomed in recent years, and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.5% in early 2023, the lowest level since the year of the first moon landing in 1969. The rate has ticked higher in recent months, but remains historically low at 4.1%. This has been spurred by rapid growth in the numbers of jobs being added to the economy.Wage growth has also strengthened, and has remained above inflation since early 2023, helping households to rebuild some of their purchasing power lost during the recent rise in living costs.StocksThe US stock market has powered to record highs in recent years. Tech stocks and the “magnificent seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla – have led the charge in particular, buoyed up by investors betting on the growth of artificial intelligence.The Biden administration oversaw a strong stock market performance, helped by the economic recovery from the pandemic. However, Wall Street surged after Trump’s election victory in November, amid investor expectations for tax cuts that could increase company profits. Markets have been rattled in Trump’s first 100 days amid concerns over his erratic approach to the economy and the threat of tariffs hitting growth and stoking inflation.The US dollarThe US dollar had been rising sharply against other leading currencies, reflecting the strength of the economy and investor concerns that Trump’s policies could stoke inflation. Tariffs pushing up the price of imported goods, driving up inflation, could force the US Federal Reserve to hold back from cutting interest rates.With inflation having fallen back, the Fed cut its benchmark rate last year by a whole percentage point – from a range between 5.25% and 5% to between 4.25% and 4.5%. Higher inflation could limit its capacity for further rate cuts.A dramatically slowing economy could force the central bank to take action to lower borrowing costs. This has led to a pullback in the dollar in recent weeks.Washington has long held a “strong dollar” policy in the view that it supports the purchasing power of US consumers, helping to keep inflation low. The dollar is also used as the currency of choice for world trade and underpins the financial system. The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has said this approach is not changing. But Trump has argued that a weaker dollar would benefit US manufacturing by making exports cheaper for overseas buyers.Prices of inputs for manufactured productsBusiness surveys have shown a marked increase in input costs for US manufacturers, providing an early warning sign for growth and inflation. The price gauge on the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) shows raw material costs rose sharply at the start of this year, in the first signs of supplier difficulties and discussions about who will pay for tariffs. The rise in input costs could dent US manufacturing output, and is likely to be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for finished goods.Consumer spendingUS consumer spending unexpectedly dropped in January for the first time in almost two years, with a fall of 0.2%, the biggest decrease in nearly four years. Cold temperatures in some parts of the country, as well as wildfires in California, were likely to have hit spending. However, some analysts warn consumer sentiment has taken a knock amid mounting concern over the strength of the economy. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump says the economy ‘went to hell’ under Biden. The opposite is true

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      Donald Trump keeps saying he inherited a terrible economy from Joe Biden and many Americans believe him, even though that’s not true. During his White House marketing event for Tesla on Tuesday, Trump said the US and its economy “went to hell” under Biden. Last week, in his national address to Congress, Trump said: “We inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.”But the truth is that by standard economic measures, the US economy was in excellent shape when Biden turned over the White House keys to Trump, even though most Americans, upset about inflation, told pollsters the economy was in poor shape.When Biden left office, the unemployment rate was a low 4.1%, and during Biden’s four years in office, the average jobless rate was lower than for any president since the 1960s. Trump has repeatedly railed against the high inflation under Biden, but the fact is that by the time Biden left office, the inflation rate had fallen to just 2.9% – down more than two-thirds from its peak and near the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal.Not only that, the nation’s GDP growth has been impressive, rising at a solid 3.1% rate at the end of Biden’s term. Ever since the pandemic ended, economic growth in the US has been considerably stronger than in the UK, France, Germany and other G7 nations. Shortly before election day, the Economist magazine ran a story saying the US economy was “the envy of the world” and had “left other rich countries in the dust”.Trump often says job growth under Biden was terrible, but the fact is that the US added 16.6m jobs during Biden’s presidency, more than during any four-year term of any previous US president. Under Trump, job growth was far worse – during his first four-year term, the nation lost 2.7m jobs overall, making Trump’s presidency the first since Herbert Hoover’s during which the nation suffered a net loss in jobs. The pandemic was largely responsible for this, but even during Trump’s first three years in office, before the pandemic hit, job growth was only half as fast as it was under Biden.Recently, Trump has repeatedly boasted how his tariffs will bring back manufacturing. Trump fails to note, however, that Biden had considerable success in bringing bring back manufacturing and factory jobs. Under most recent presidents, the US lost manufacturing jobs, but under Biden, the nation gained an impressive 750,000 factory jobs, the most under any president since the 1970s. A big reason for this was that as a result of Biden’s green jobs legislation and the Chips Act to boost semiconductor production, manufacturing investment boomed, more than doubling during Biden’s four years in office.Biden took considerable pride about how the economy performed under him, even though he failed to persuade most Americans that the it was doing well. In December, Biden wrote: “Incomes are up by nearly $4,000 adjusted for inflation [since he took office], and unions have won wage increases from 25% to 60% in industries like autos, ports, aerospace, and trucking. We’ve seen 20 million applications to start small businesses. Our economy has grown 3% per year on average the last four years – faster than any other advanced economy. Domestic energy production is at a record high.”Many economists vigorously disagree with Trump’s claim that he inherited a poor economy. Paul Krugman wrote that in January, when Biden left office, the US had what was “very close to a Goldilocks economy, in which everything is more or less just right”. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, had even more glowing words. “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” he said. “The US economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than pre-pandemic.”Trump pays attention to one measure of the economy above all others: how the stock market is doing. During Biden’s four years, Wall Street did very well. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 39% and the S&P 500 soared by 55.7%, including a 28% jump during 2024. In contrast, the stock market is down overall since Trump took office as investors have grown alarmed about the president’s tariff war against the US’s trading partners.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo be sure, there were some serious economic problems under Biden. Housing affordability was a major problem, and inflation rose to uncomfortable levels. The spike in prices was caused largely by two factors: the pandemic, which gave rise to worldwide supply chain problems, and Putin’s war in Ukraine, which pushed up food and fuel prices. But Trump, in denouncing Biden on inflation, ignores all that.As Trump’s trade war spooks the markets and makes nervous CEOs rethink their investment plans, many economists are saying it’s more and more likely the US will stumble into recession this year.Trump has a long history of refusing to accept blame for mistakes and problems, and by repeatedly claiming he inherited a horrible economy, he seems to be laying the groundwork to blame Biden if the country slides into a painful recession. More