How America Learned to Love Tariffs

In the case of Smoot-Hawley, it was clearly the second. At the time those tariffs were enacted, the United States suffered from too much saving and too little consumption. It is why the country exported so much to the rest of the world, like China does today. What Americans needed then (as Eccles understood) was to boost the share of production dis

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The idea that more trade is good (on balance) is deeply engrained in anybody who went to graduate school in economics. In May 1930, over a thousand economists had written a letter encouraging President Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley bill. And yet there is something else economists do know but tend to keep closely to themselves: the aggregate gains

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This consumer-to-producer shift means tariffs have repercussions for a country’s gross domestic product, or the value of the goods and services produced by its businesses and workers. Because everything an economy produces is either consumed or saved, any policy that raises production relative to consumption automatically forces up the domestic sav

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