The Era of Frictionless Trade Is Over

“There is now sand — a lot of it — in the gears of global commerce, and it won’t be going away in the foreseeable future,” Axios reports.

“President Trump may have backed down on some of the most extreme — and hardest to justify — trade barriers he announced a week earlier. But the tariffs that remain in place still make for a more fractured global economy, albeit with slightly different fractures.”

“Instead of waging an all-out trade war with practically all U.S. trading partners, all at once, the new policy alignment amounts to an escalated trade war with China amid ongoing skirmishes with the rest of the world.”