The world’s majority has nothing to gain from escalating tariffs and counter-tariffs.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs hit the Global South countries the hardest. As Heather Stewart explained in the Guardian: “One of the most wilfully destructive aspects of Donald Trump’s shock and awe trade policy is the imposition of punitive tariffs on developing countries across Asia, including rates of 49% for Cambodia, 37% for Bangladesh, 48% for Laos.”
Vietnam was hit with a 46% tariff; Indonesian 32%; Taiwan 32%; and Malaysia 24%.
The US has imposed a 10% tariff on imports from Australia (only 6% of Australia’s total exports). The main economic effects in Australia will be indirect, through the impact of US tariffs on Australia’s major trading partners, China (32% of Australia’s exports) and Japan (12%), and on global economic growth.
Ironically, Trump’s tariff war might spark a global recession by sending the US into recession first, as some of the world’s biggest banks are warning. Even the billionaire fund manager and Trump supporter Bill Ackman urged Trump to allow a 90-day pause or risk losing business support — which Trump partially accepted on April 9 (maintaining a minimum 10% tariff on all countries while raising the tariff on China to 125%).
Ackman had posted on X on April 7: “If, on the other hand, on April 9th we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.”
Other billionaires have been preparing to cash in on the stock market chaos. US billionaire Warren Buffet, who once famously quipped “There's class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”, has been selling off shares and building up a US$321 billion war chest in preparation.
With some $5–6 trillion wiped out in US stocks since Trump took office, billionaires who listened to warnings about the massively over-valued US share market, will be able to cash in on the crises by “buying cheap”.
But billionaire “winners” in an economic crisis only exist because the world’s working majority pay a terrible price for its eventual resolution.
Jobs are destroyed by the millions, people lose their homes and livelihoods and entire nations and communities are devastated.
As the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 showed, governments rushed in to bail out the banks, but hundreds of millions of working people suffered, became more indebted and insecure, and inequality sharply increased.
Right now the world’s governments and central banks are drawing up plans to again bail out the capitalist system in the event of a Trump-precipitated global economic crisis. They won’t be putting ordinary working people’s interests first.
A capitalist “solution” to the impending global economic crisis will also set back measures to respond to the climate emergency.
There was already a massive reduction in global funds for climate action after the COVID-19 pandemic, before Trump’s “drill-baby-drill” regime took office. Now, scientists warn we are at a frightening new phase. | 
