| Bigger than expected. If there is one simple takeaway from US President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement on Wednesday, that is it. Speaking to a cheering crowd in the White House’s Rose Garden, Trump laid out plans for a 10% baseline tariff on all imports from the world that would rise sharply for major trading partners depending on their perceived barriers. Read more: Trump’s Trade War and the Economic Impact: Tariff Tracker If those reciprocal tariffs go into effect as planned starting on April 5, imports from China will face a new 34% tariff on top of the additional 20% Trump has already announced and those from his first term. Which means that Trump has imposed new tariffs totaling 54% on the US’s biggest economic rival in the past two months.  WATCH: President Donald Trump runs down the reciprocal tariff rates the United States will impose on worldwide trading partners. The European Union will face new 20% additional duties, Japan another 24%, and so on. The only winners for now — and only because they face their own already-announced 25% tariffs with broad exceptions for many cars and other goods — are Canada and Mexico. Read more: EU Plans Emergency Measures to Shield Economy from Trump Tariffs Maeva Cousin and Rana Sajedi of Bloomberg Economics estimate that the announcement “could add up to around 17 percentage points to the US average tariff rate. This could create sizable stagflation risks for the US economy, and present severe challenges for partners that are most reliant on US demand.” ‘Our Turn’ The full list details the Trump administration’s calculations of perceived trade barriers and the US rate in response. The highest US tariff rate of 50% will be levied on imports from the African country of Lesotho and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a tiny self-governing French protectorate just off the Atlantic coast of Canada. For Trump the announcement marks the culmination of almost a decade of protectionist threats. ““For years, hard-working American citizens were forced to sit on the sidelines as other nations got rich and powerful, much of it at our expense. But now it’s our turn to prosper,” he said. For the world it is likely to mean a major economic shock and the tossing aside by the longest-running superpower of the post-war global rules-based system it helped design. “Our partners will now be under domestic pressure to respond, while helping their firms weather this storm,” said Wendy Cutler, vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, in an emailed statement. “We can expect global economic growth to start plummeting as trade flows decline, prices increase and businesses put off investments.” In Trump’s telling the tariffs will hasten in a new era of American prosperity. But financial markets didn’t see the same promise. S&P 500 futures were trading down more than 3% two hours after he began speaking. That reaction from investors came for one simple reason. What the US president laid out Wednesday is a plan that will now rank as the single largest act of American protectionism in more than a century. And to many economists, investors, and CEOs that is an ominous move rather than one to cheer. —Shawn Donnan in Washington Bloomberg’s tariff tracker follows all the twists and turns of global trade wars. Click here for more of Bloomberg.com’s most-read stories about trade, supply chains and shipping. | 
