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I don't tend to take economists that seriously. They get things more wrong than the weather man, and tend to only be good at explaining how things went wrong after the fact.

Ask 10 economists the same question and you will get 10 different answers.

People have to understand that Trump thinks of everything like its a buisness.

How a buisness CEO will run his company is very different to how most politicians run their countries.

He is the first businessman to be in that position in the US.

In buisness the other companies are your opposition, and you are in competition for market share.

He sees other countries as opposition to the US, and not trading partners.

So, in his mind, he has to take an adversarial approach to them.

When he sees a trade deficit he sees the US getting ripped off.

We look at trade as a macrothing. OK, we sell more to country A than we buy, but we buy more from country B than we sell. When they are added up together, how did we go.

He is looking at it like a CFO. He is going through every line entry. He thinks that the US should sell more to every country than it buys. So if there is a trade deficit with one country, then it's a loss on the PL sheet, and needs to be addressed.

Now, thats impractical and doesn't work with international trade, but he is so narcissistic (and that's not always a bad thing) and parochial, that he thinks the US can win on every deal with every country. Sometimes confidence can be your weak point.

How he worked his tarrifs out is this.

Everyone got the baseline of 10%. Then, countries that the US has a trade deficit with, or had tarrifs on the US, he increased that base rate.

We only got 10% as the US has a massive trade surplus with us, so he is winning this deal, but we get the baseline.

There has always been a small group of economists who believe tarrifs do work, and they do in some instances. All the less developed countries have tarrifs to protect their industry from the bigger more powerful ones. These give them breathing space to build up their economy and make it resilient enough to compete on the open market.

You have to understand that these tarrifs arnt just a wild invention of Trumps. He doesn't know enough about them to lead anything like this.

His main man is Dr Peter Navaro, one of the most educated economists out there. He has a Phd in Economics from Harvard, a Masters in Public Administrative from Harvard, and is a Professor Emeratus of Economics and Public Policy at the University of California.

He is the one who has formulated this move and Trump is following it.

If nothing else, it's going to be interesting to see what the real life outcomes are of this theory. Will tarrifs be as good as Navaro believes, or will it be as bad as other economists believe.

I think it could benefit us in the long run, that's why Albo isn't jumping at shadows.