🕷️ Crawler Inspector

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Raw Queries and Responses

1. Shard Calculation

Query:

Response:

Calculated Shard: 84 (from laksa034)

2. Crawled Status Check

Query:

curl -X POST \
  'http://laksa084.int.ahrefs:8124/' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'X-ClickHouse-Database: crawler3' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic YXBpOg==' \
  -d 'SELECT getAhrefsURLFromUnparsed(src_unparsed) AS found_url, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(download_stamp), 0) AS crawl_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(props_url_first_seen), 0) AS first_indexed_time, download_http_code AS http_code, src_unparsed AS src_unparsed, src_root_hash AS src_root_hash, history_drop_reason AS history_drop_reason, meta_title AS meta_title, meta_descriptions AS meta_descriptions, attrs_boilerpipe_text AS attrs_boilerpipe_text, attrs_markdown AS attrs_markdown, attrs_readable_markdown AS attrs_readable_markdown, meta_canonical AS meta_canonical FROM crawler3.page_info_local FINAL PREWHERE (src_root_hash, src_unparsed) IN ((getAhrefsRootHashFromUnparsed(getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html\')), getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html\'))) FORMAT JSONEachRow'

Response:

{"found_url":"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/11\/business\/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html","crawl_time":1769624493,"first_indexed_time":1744362230,"http_code":200,"src_unparsed":"com,nytimes!www,\/2025\/04\/11\/business\/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html s443","src_root_hash":"4566504020376537684","history_drop_reason":null,"meta_title":"How This Trade War Is Different From All Other Trade Wars - The New York Times","meta_descriptions":["By acting on his own, President Trump has broken with more than 200 years of U.S. history in which Congress set the direction of trade policy."],"attrs_boilerpipe_text":"Advertisement\nSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\nStrategies\nBy acting on his own, President Trump has broken with more than 200 years of U.S. history in which Congress set the direction of trade policy.\nHowever the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war have begun.\nCredit...\nEric Lee\/The New York Times\nApril 11, 2025\nIf the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before.\nThat’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I called him for perspective. He told me that what we were experiencing was way outside the historical norm. One man alone has risked the first global trade war since the 1930s by raising tariffs to levels unseen for more than a century. The president’s actions, he said, represent a “big break with history.”\nEven if Mr. Trump removes the tariffs — he announced a 90-day pause for some of the highest ones on Wednesday, while keeping a 10 percent base line for virtually all imports from around the world — his go-it-alone stance is a major departure. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war, a dreaded relic of the Great Depression, have begun in the 21st century.\nThe consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high. They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States — all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president of the United States.\nUntil now, it had always taken decades of consensus building to bend the trajectory of trade policy, Professor Irwin said. When the country changed course in earlier times, Congress played the dominant role. Even when it began delegating authority to negotiate trade deals to the president in the 1930s, Congress set the direction of U.S. tariffs: downward.\nNow, it’s unquestionably the president who has taken the United States on a new and hazardous path. “This is of historical significance,” Professor Irwin said.\nIn the past, wars provided the impetus for change. The Civil War and World War I led to higher tariffs enacted by Congress after lengthy discussion, and those were “big breaks” with history, Professor Irwin said. Tariffs began falling in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and with some exceptions, including the Biden and first Trump administrations, they remained fairly low.\n“But here we are, in a peacetime economy,” Professor Irwin said. “We’re basically at full employment, 4 percent. There’s no societal consensus that there’s a big problem with trade, and yet we have one person, the president, radically changing the direction of U.S. trade policy.”\nThe Fallout\nStock markets have been swirling — falling for days, then leaping in delight on Wednesday at news that some of the U.S. tariffs had been delayed. It was the biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis\nof 2008\n, with the benchmark S&P 500 stock index rising 9.5 percent and erasing some of the losses that investors have had to endure this year. By Thursday, though, the enthusiasm had ebbed. The S&P 500 fell 3.5 percent for the day, only to rise 1.8 percent on Friday.\nWhether the markets keep rallying, or sink back into a maelstrom of worry, is likely to depend on what Mr. Trump does about the direction of tariff policy, which economists view, in an overwhelming consensus, as wrongheaded and profoundly dangerous.\nUntil Wednesday, the president’s series of tariff announcements had set off expectations of sharply rising prices for households and businesses alike, raising a strong possibility that a spreading global trade war could send the U.S. economy spiraling into a recession and cause vast human hardship.\nImage\nStock markets have been swirling since President Trump announced his “reciprocal” tariffs this month.\nCredit...\nAshley Gilbertson for The New York Times\nAfter the president said he was delaying some tariffs, Goldman Sachs abruptly dropped its forecast that a recession was likely. Even so, the Goldman prognosis was bleak: “We are reverting to our previous non-recession base-line forecast with G.D.P. growth of 0.5 percent and a 45 percent probability of recession.”\nChina has retaliated with tariffs of its own. By Thursday, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods had\nreached\n145 percent; China reciprocated with tariffs on U.S. products, raising them on Friday to 125 percent. Negotiations were underway with many countries — but not China — the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. “Do not retaliate,” he said, “and you will be rewarded.” The European Union said it would delay its plans for retaliation for 90 days.\nCongressional resistance to the Trump trade policy has begun, with a mainly Democratic effort in the Senate to end the “\nnational emergency\n” that the president declared as the legal justification for his tariffs. But as my colleague\nAna Swanson\nwrote, the odds against such an effort’s succeeding quickly are high. Even if it passed in the Senate, it’s not clear that a resolution to roll back the tariffs would ever reach the House floor. If it did, and passed there, Mr. Trump could veto it, and overriding a veto with a two-thirds vote isn’t likely in the current political firmament.\nThe Sweep of History\nAs unusual as the Trump administration’s swerves on tariffs have been, they are possible only because Congress has been delegating authority on trade policy to the president in stages, starting in 1934.\nArticle I, Section 8 of the Constitution\nexpressly reserves for\nCongress\nthe power to impose tariffs.\nCongressional dominance over trade policy shifted substantially after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 ushered in the catastrophic global trade war and worsened the Great Depression. Then, as now, economists overwhelmingly opposed a tariff increase, imploring President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law, but he did anyway.\nThat disastrous legislation was a product of what historians call congressional “logrolling” — the trading of votes by legislators to secure favorable action on projects of interest to each one — that had largely determined trade policy. U.S. tariffs in the 1930s increased for domestic reasons — largely, to protect local industry — without much advance thought about the global consequences.\nWith the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that the tariffs were major factors in a dire turn in world history, said Dale Copeland, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. In the 1930s, Britain and France turned inward and focused their commerce within their imperial empires, while the United States, a nascent power, had a sphere of influence of its own, Professor Copeland said.\nJapan did not yet have such an empire. It set about acquiring one in China and in Southeast Asia, at least in part, because within a year of the enactment of Smoot-Hawley, Japan had “lost most of its trade” and decided that it needed “other ways to get supplies of raw materials and oil and other important things,” Professor Copeland said. Tariff barriers created enormous international tensions and perverse incentives, lessons that “the world has already learned, and may need to relearn now,” he said.\nEd Clissold, senior U.S. strategist at Ned Davis Research, an independent financial research firm, said the geopolitical implications of rising tariffs needed to be studied closely. “If we cut off trade with China and raise tariffs on other countries in the region, China’s going to focus even more heavily in Southeast Asia,” he said.\nEmily Bowersock Hill, chief executive of Bowersock Capital Partners, a wealth management firm in Lawrence, Kan., said that without checks on his behavior, Mr. Trump was making erratic geopolitical moves.\n“It’s taken decades to establish the reputation of the United States around the world,” she said. “Our reputation, our alliances, our brand were a primary advantage. It wouldn’t take much to lose all of that.”\nThe U.S. presidency has always been powerful, but in the past, presidents were hemmed in by law, custom and politics. As the wild swings of recent days show, however, Mr. Trump is unaffected by most of those restraints. More than in the past, the direction of the markets and the global economy depends on the mood of the president.\nA version of this article appears in print on\nApril 13, 2025\n, Section BU, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: This Trade War Is Different From All Others\n.\nOrder Reprints\n|\nToday’s Paper\n|\nSubscribe\nRelated Content\ninEducation: Finance and Economics\nNew York Times inEducation has been designed as a resource to connect Times journalism with key areas of study for students and faculty through our Education Subscription Program. If you are affiliated with a U.S. college, visit accessnyt.com to learn if your institution provides New York Times access. Others should inquire with their school or local library. If you are a faculty or staff member interested in bringing The New York Times to your school, visit the Group Subscriptions Page.\nJacqueline Gu\/The New York Times\nMojo Wang\nFabrice Coffrini\/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images\nMore in Business\nImani Khayyam for The New York Times\nOliver Farshi for The New York Times\nScott McIntyre for The New York Times\nDeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times\nEditors’ Picks\nIllustration by Tomi Um\nPeter White\/Getty Images\nTrending in The Times\nBobbi Lin for The New York Times\nKenny Holston\/The New York Times\n.\nAndy Fraser\nMiguel Porlan\nButch Dill\/Associated Press\nHiroko Masuike\/The New York Times\nCoast Guard District Southwestern Mindanao\nJuan Bautista Climént Palmer\nAdvertisement\nSKIP ADVERTISEMENT","attrs_markdown":"[Skip to content](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/11\/business\/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#site-content)[Skip to site index](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/11\/business\/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#site-index)\n\nSearch & Section Navigation\n\nSection Navigation\n\nSearch\n\n[Business](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/business)\n\n[Log in](https:\/\/myaccount.nytimes.com\/auth\/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fsubscription%2Fonboarding-offer%3FcampaignId%3D7JFJX%26EXIT_URI%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F2025%252F04%252F11%252Fbusiness%252Ftariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html&asset=masthead)\n\nWednesday, January 28, 2026\n\n[Today’s Paper](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/todayspaper)\n\nGlobal Economy\n\n- [Price of Gold Soars](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/01\/26\/business\/gold-prices.html)\n- [Record Debt](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/01\/27\/business\/economy\/government-debt-bonds.html)\n- [Japan Raises Interest Rates](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/12\/18\/business\/bank-of-japan-rates-inflation.html)\n- [I.M.F. Prods China](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/12\/10\/business\/imf-china-currency.html)\n\nAdvertisement\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/11\/business\/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#after-top)\n\nSupported by\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/11\/business\/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#after-sponsor)\n\nStrategies\n\n# How This Trade War Is Different From All Other Trade Wars\nBy acting on his own, President Trump has broken with more than 200 years of U.S. history in which Congress set the direction of trade policy.\n\n- Share full article\n- 185\n\n![A close-up of President Trump's hands holding a pen. He is wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/04\/13\/multimedia\/11biz-strategies-qzpj\/11biz-strategies-qzpj-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n\nHowever the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war have begun.Credit...Eric Lee\/The New York Times\n\n[![Jeff Sommer](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2018\/02\/20\/multimedia\/author-jeff-sommer\/author-jeff-sommer-thumbLarge-v2.png)](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/jeff-sommer)\n\nBy [Jeff Sommer](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/jeff-sommer)\n\nJeff Sommer writes [Strategies](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/column\/business-strategies), a weekly column on markets, finance and the economy.\n\nApril 11, 2025\n\nIf the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before.\n\nThat’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I called him for perspective. He told me that what we were experiencing was way outside the historical norm. One man alone has risked the first global trade war since the 1930s by raising tariffs to levels unseen for more than a century. The president’s actions, he said, represent a “big break with history.”\n\nEven if Mr. Trump removes the tariffs — he announced a 90-day pause for some of the highest ones on Wednesday, while keeping a 10 percent base line for virtually all imports from around the world — his go-it-alone stance is a major departure. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war, a dreaded relic of the Great Depression, have begun in the 21st century.\n\nThe consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high. They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States — all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president of the United States.\n\nUntil now, it had always taken decades of consensus building to bend the trajectory of trade policy, Professor Irwin said. When the country changed course in earlier times, Congress played the dominant role. Even when it began delegating authority to negotiate trade deals to the president in the 1930s, Congress set the direction of U.S. tariffs: downward.\n\nNow, it’s unquestionably the president who has taken the United States on a new and hazardous path. “This is of historical significance,” Professor Irwin said.\n\nIn the past, wars provided the impetus for change. The Civil War and World War I led to higher tariffs enacted by Congress after lengthy discussion, and those were “big breaks” with history, Professor Irwin said. Tariffs began falling in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and with some exceptions, including the Biden and first Trump administrations, they remained fairly low.\n\n“But here we are, in a peacetime economy,” Professor Irwin said. “We’re basically at full employment, 4 percent. There’s no societal consensus that there’s a big problem with trade, and yet we have one person, the president, radically changing the direction of U.S. trade policy.”\n\n## The Fallout\nStock markets have been swirling — falling for days, then leaping in delight on Wednesday at news that some of the U.S. tariffs had been delayed. It was the biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis [of 2008](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/live\/2025\/04\/08\/business\/trump-tariffs-stock-market\/heres-the-latest?smid=url-share), with the benchmark S\\&P 500 stock index rising 9.5 percent and erasing some of the losses that investors have had to endure this year. By Thursday, though, the enthusiasm had ebbed. The S\\&P 500 fell 3.5 percent for the day, only to rise 1.8 percent on Friday.\n\n## Editors’ Picks\n[![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/26\/multimedia\/WELL-ASK-COFFEE-MOOD1-mqtz\/WELL-ASK-COFFEE-MOOD1-mqtz-thumbLarge.jpg)Can Coffee Really Boost Your Mood?](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/01\/27\/well\/coffee-mood-boost.html)\n\n[![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/23\/multimedia\/23OpenThread-vkcq\/23OpenThread-vkcq-thumbLarge.jpg)Can I Wear a Sweatshirt to Work?](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/01\/26\/fashion\/sweatshirt-hoodie-work-office.html)\n\n[![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/27\/multimedia\/27TBR-Zengerle-Review-czqv\/27TBR-Zengerle-Review-czqv-thumbLarge.jpg)How Did Tucker Carlson Get This Way? How Did America?](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/01\/27\/books\/review\/hated-by-all-the-right-people-jason-zengerle.html)\n\nAdvertisement\n\n[SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/11\/business\/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#after-pp_edpick)\n\nWhether the markets keep rallying, or sink back into a maelstrom of worry, is likely to depend on what Mr. Trump does about the direction of tariff policy, which economists view, in an overwhelming consensus, as wrongheaded and profoundly dangerous.\n\nUntil Wednesday, the president’s series of tariff announcements had set off expectations of sharply rising prices for households and businesses alike, raising a strong possibility that a spreading global trade war could send the U.S. economy spiraling into a recession and cause vast human hardship.\n\nImage\n\n![A trader looking at a computer screen, with screens listing stock prices above him.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/04\/13\/multimedia\/11biz-strategies-pwhj\/11biz-strategies-pwhj-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n\nStock markets have been swirling since President Trump announced his “reciprocal” tariffs this month.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times\n\nAfter the president said he was delaying some tariffs, Goldman Sachs abruptly dropped its forecast that a recession was likely. Even so, the Goldman prognosis was bleak: “We are reverting to our previous non-recession base-line forecast with G.D.P. growth of 0.5 percent and a 45 percent probability of recession.”\n\nChina has retaliated with tariffs of its own. By Thursday, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods had [reached](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/live\/2025\/04\/10\/business\/trump-tariffs-stocks) 145 percent; China reciprocated with tariffs on U.S. products, raising them on Friday to 125 percent. Negotiations were underway with many countries — but not China — the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. “Do not retaliate,” he said, “and you will be rewarded.” The European Union said it would delay its plans for retaliation for 90 days.\n\nCongressional resistance to the Trump trade policy has begun, with a mainly Democratic effort in the Senate to end the “[national emergency](https:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/presidential-actions\/2025\/04\/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits\/)” that the president declared as the legal justification for his tariffs. But as my colleague [Ana Swanson](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/live\/2025\/04\/08\/us\/trump-news-tariffs\/40390ebc-a984-5f36-8ce7-b76740d860dc?smid=url-share) wrote, the odds against such an effort’s succeeding quickly are high. Even if it passed in the Senate, it’s not clear that a resolution to roll back the tariffs would ever reach the House floor. If it did, and passed there, Mr. Trump could veto it, and overriding a veto with a two-thirds vote isn’t likely in the current political firmament.\n\n## The Sweep of History\nAs unusual as the Trump administration’s swerves on tariffs have been, they are possible only because Congress has been delegating authority on trade policy to the president in stages, starting in 1934.\n\n[Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution](https:\/\/constitutioncenter.org\/the-constitution\/articles\/article-i#article-section-8) expressly reserves for [Congress](https:\/\/www.congress.gov\/crs-product\/R47679#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Constitution%20gives%20Congress,agreements%20outside%20of%20the%20treaty) the power to impose tariffs.\n\nCongressional dominance over trade policy shifted substantially after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 ushered in the catastrophic global trade war and worsened the Great Depression. Then, as now, economists overwhelmingly opposed a tariff increase, imploring President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law, but he did anyway.\n\nThat disastrous legislation was a product of what historians call congressional “logrolling” — the trading of votes by legislators to secure favorable action on projects of interest to each one — that had largely determined trade policy. U.S. tariffs in the 1930s increased for domestic reasons — largely, to protect local industry — without much advance thought about the global consequences.\n\nWith the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that the tariffs were major factors in a dire turn in world history, said Dale Copeland, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. In the 1930s, Britain and France turned inward and focused their commerce within their imperial empires, while the United States, a nascent power, had a sphere of influence of its own, Professor Copeland said.\n\nJapan did not yet have such an empire. It set about acquiring one in China and in Southeast Asia, at least in part, because within a year of the enactment of Smoot-Hawley, Japan had “lost most of its trade” and decided that it needed “other ways to get supplies of raw materials and oil and other important things,” Professor Copeland said. Tariff barriers created enormous international tensions and perverse incentives, lessons that “the world has already learned, and may need to relearn now,” he said.\n\nEd Clissold, senior U.S. strategist at Ned Davis Research, an independent financial research firm, said the geopolitical implications of rising tariffs needed to be studied closely. “If we cut off trade with China and raise tariffs on other countries in the region, China’s going to focus even more heavily in Southeast Asia,” he said.\n\nEmily Bowersock Hill, chief executive of Bowersock Capital Partners, a wealth management firm in Lawrence, Kan., said that without checks on his behavior, Mr. Trump was making erratic geopolitical moves.\n\n“It’s taken decades to establish the reputation of the United States around the world,” she said. “Our reputation, our alliances, our brand were a primary advantage. It wouldn’t take much to lose all of that.”\n\nThe U.S. presidency has always been powerful, but in the past, presidents were hemmed in by law, custom and politics. As the wild swings of recent days show, however, Mr. Trump is unaffected by most of those restraints. More than in the past, the direction of the markets and the global economy depends on the mood of the president.\n\n**More Strategies Columns by Jeff Sommer**\n\n[![]()The Fed Isn’t Rushing to Save the Markets This Time April 5, 2025](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/05\/business\/tariffs-stock-market-fed-inflation.html)\n\n[![]()In Worst Stock Market in Years, Slow and Boring Has Eased the Pain April 3, 2025](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/03\/business\/stock-market-investing-retirement-pain-stocks-bonds.html)\n\n[![]()Calm Your Investing Life: Own a Bit of Everything March 28, 2025](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/03\/28\/business\/investing-international-stocks-bonds.html)\n\n[Jeff Sommer](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/jeff-sommer) writes [Strategies](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/column\/business-strategies), a weekly column on markets, finance and the economy.\n\nA version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2025, Section BU, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: This Trade War Is Different From All Others. [Order Reprints](https:\/\/nytimes.wrightsmedia.com\/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/subscriptions\/Multiproduct\/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY)\n\nRead 185 comments\n\n- Share full article\n- 185\n\n## Related Content\n### [inEducation: Finance and Economics](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/spotlight\/nytimesineducation-financeandeconomics)\nNew York Times inEducation has been designed as a resource to connect Times journalism with key areas of study for students and faculty through our Education Subscription Program. If you are affiliated with a U.S. college, visit accessnyt.com to learn if your institution provides New York Times access. Others should inquire with their school or local library. If you are a faculty or staff member interested in bringing The New York Times to your school, visit the Group Subscriptions Page.\n\n- [Trump Said He’d Unleash the Economy in Year 1. 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He is wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/04\/13\/multimedia\/11biz-strategies-qzpj\/11biz-strategies-qzpj-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n\nHowever the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war have begun.Credit...Eric Lee\/The New York Times\n\nApril 11, 2025\n\nIf the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before.\n\nThat’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I called him for perspective. He told me that what we were experiencing was way outside the historical norm. One man alone has risked the first global trade war since the 1930s by raising tariffs to levels unseen for more than a century. The president’s actions, he said, represent a “big break with history.”\n\nEven if Mr. Trump removes the tariffs — he announced a 90-day pause for some of the highest ones on Wednesday, while keeping a 10 percent base line for virtually all imports from around the world — his go-it-alone stance is a major departure. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war, a dreaded relic of the Great Depression, have begun in the 21st century.\n\nThe consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high. They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States — all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president of the United States.\n\nUntil now, it had always taken decades of consensus building to bend the trajectory of trade policy, Professor Irwin said. When the country changed course in earlier times, Congress played the dominant role. Even when it began delegating authority to negotiate trade deals to the president in the 1930s, Congress set the direction of U.S. tariffs: downward.\n\nNow, it’s unquestionably the president who has taken the United States on a new and hazardous path. “This is of historical significance,” Professor Irwin said.\n\nIn the past, wars provided the impetus for change. The Civil War and World War I led to higher tariffs enacted by Congress after lengthy discussion, and those were “big breaks” with history, Professor Irwin said. Tariffs began falling in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and with some exceptions, including the Biden and first Trump administrations, they remained fairly low.\n\n“But here we are, in a peacetime economy,” Professor Irwin said. “We’re basically at full employment, 4 percent. There’s no societal consensus that there’s a big problem with trade, and yet we have one person, the president, radically changing the direction of U.S. trade policy.”\n\n## The Fallout\nStock markets have been swirling — falling for days, then leaping in delight on Wednesday at news that some of the U.S. tariffs had been delayed. It was the biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis [of 2008](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/live\/2025\/04\/08\/business\/trump-tariffs-stock-market\/heres-the-latest?smid=url-share), with the benchmark S\\&P 500 stock index rising 9.5 percent and erasing some of the losses that investors have had to endure this year. By Thursday, though, the enthusiasm had ebbed. The S\\&P 500 fell 3.5 percent for the day, only to rise 1.8 percent on Friday.\n\nWhether the markets keep rallying, or sink back into a maelstrom of worry, is likely to depend on what Mr. Trump does about the direction of tariff policy, which economists view, in an overwhelming consensus, as wrongheaded and profoundly dangerous.\n\nUntil Wednesday, the president’s series of tariff announcements had set off expectations of sharply rising prices for households and businesses alike, raising a strong possibility that a spreading global trade war could send the U.S. economy spiraling into a recession and cause vast human hardship.\n\nImage\n\n![A trader looking at a computer screen, with screens listing stock prices above him.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/04\/13\/multimedia\/11biz-strategies-pwhj\/11biz-strategies-pwhj-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n\nStock markets have been swirling since President Trump announced his “reciprocal” tariffs this month.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times\n\nAfter the president said he was delaying some tariffs, Goldman Sachs abruptly dropped its forecast that a recession was likely. Even so, the Goldman prognosis was bleak: “We are reverting to our previous non-recession base-line forecast with G.D.P. growth of 0.5 percent and a 45 percent probability of recession.”\n\nChina has retaliated with tariffs of its own. By Thursday, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods had [reached](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/live\/2025\/04\/10\/business\/trump-tariffs-stocks) 145 percent; China reciprocated with tariffs on U.S. products, raising them on Friday to 125 percent. Negotiations were underway with many countries — but not China — the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. “Do not retaliate,” he said, “and you will be rewarded.” The European Union said it would delay its plans for retaliation for 90 days.\n\nCongressional resistance to the Trump trade policy has begun, with a mainly Democratic effort in the Senate to end the “[national emergency](https:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/presidential-actions\/2025\/04\/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits\/)” that the president declared as the legal justification for his tariffs. But as my colleague [Ana Swanson](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/live\/2025\/04\/08\/us\/trump-news-tariffs\/40390ebc-a984-5f36-8ce7-b76740d860dc?smid=url-share) wrote, the odds against such an effort’s succeeding quickly are high. Even if it passed in the Senate, it’s not clear that a resolution to roll back the tariffs would ever reach the House floor. If it did, and passed there, Mr. Trump could veto it, and overriding a veto with a two-thirds vote isn’t likely in the current political firmament.\n\n## The Sweep of History\nAs unusual as the Trump administration’s swerves on tariffs have been, they are possible only because Congress has been delegating authority on trade policy to the president in stages, starting in 1934.\n\n[Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution](https:\/\/constitutioncenter.org\/the-constitution\/articles\/article-i#article-section-8) expressly reserves for [Congress](https:\/\/www.congress.gov\/crs-product\/R47679#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Constitution%20gives%20Congress,agreements%20outside%20of%20the%20treaty) the power to impose tariffs.\n\nCongressional dominance over trade policy shifted substantially after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 ushered in the catastrophic global trade war and worsened the Great Depression. Then, as now, economists overwhelmingly opposed a tariff increase, imploring President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law, but he did anyway.\n\nThat disastrous legislation was a product of what historians call congressional “logrolling” — the trading of votes by legislators to secure favorable action on projects of interest to each one — that had largely determined trade policy. U.S. tariffs in the 1930s increased for domestic reasons — largely, to protect local industry — without much advance thought about the global consequences.\n\nWith the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that the tariffs were major factors in a dire turn in world history, said Dale Copeland, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. In the 1930s, Britain and France turned inward and focused their commerce within their imperial empires, while the United States, a nascent power, had a sphere of influence of its own, Professor Copeland said.\n\nJapan did not yet have such an empire. It set about acquiring one in China and in Southeast Asia, at least in part, because within a year of the enactment of Smoot-Hawley, Japan had “lost most of its trade” and decided that it needed “other ways to get supplies of raw materials and oil and other important things,” Professor Copeland said. Tariff barriers created enormous international tensions and perverse incentives, lessons that “the world has already learned, and may need to relearn now,” he said.\n\nEd Clissold, senior U.S. strategist at Ned Davis Research, an independent financial research firm, said the geopolitical implications of rising tariffs needed to be studied closely. “If we cut off trade with China and raise tariffs on other countries in the region, China’s going to focus even more heavily in Southeast Asia,” he said.\n\nEmily Bowersock Hill, chief executive of Bowersock Capital Partners, a wealth management firm in Lawrence, Kan., said that without checks on his behavior, Mr. Trump was making erratic geopolitical moves.\n\n“It’s taken decades to establish the reputation of the United States around the world,” she said. “Our reputation, our alliances, our brand were a primary advantage. It wouldn’t take much to lose all of that.”\n\nThe U.S. presidency has always been powerful, but in the past, presidents were hemmed in by law, custom and politics. As the wild swings of recent days show, however, Mr. Trump is unaffected by most of those restraints. More than in the past, the direction of the markets and the global economy depends on the mood of the president.\n\nA version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2025, Section BU, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: This Trade War Is Different From All Others. [Order Reprints](https:\/\/nytimes.wrightsmedia.com\/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/section\/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/subscriptions\/Multiproduct\/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY)\n\n## Related Content\n[inEducation: Finance and Economics](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/spotlight\/nytimesineducation-financeandeconomics)\n\nNew York Times inEducation has been designed as a resource to connect Times journalism with key areas of study for students and faculty through our Education Subscription Program. If you are affiliated with a U.S. college, visit accessnyt.com to learn if your institution provides New York Times access. Others should inquire with their school or local library. 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who cannot sell their rice.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/26\/multimedia\/26biz-mississippi-farms-B1\/00biz-mississippi-02-lhbq-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Imani Khayyam for The New York Times\n- ![Joel Holsinger made hundreds of dollars on Kalshi after correctly guessing which turkey President Trump would pardon last year.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/25\/multimedia\/00biz-prediction-whales-01-bclz\/00biz-prediction-whales-01-bclz-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Oliver Farshi for The New York Times\n- ![The announcement that UPS was continuing to thin its work force could add to Americans’ concerns about the job market.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/27\/multimedia\/27biz-ups-tlqb\/27biz-ups-tlqb-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Scott McIntyre for The New York Times\n- ![Part of the appeal for Goodwill shoppers is the treasure hunt of searching the racks for hidden gems.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/21\/multimedia\/00biz-goodwill-qzkw\/00biz-goodwill-qzkw-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times\n\nEditors’ Picks\n\n- ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/24\/magazine\/24mag-ethicist\/24mag-ethicist-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Illustration by Tomi Um\n- ![Stephanie Cavalli opens the Chanel show.](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/28\/fashion\/28ST-CHANEL-REVIEW-top\/28ST-CHANEL-REVIEW-top-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)\n  \n  Peter White\/Getty Images\n\nTrending in The Times\n\n- ![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/01\/26\/smarter-living\/wirecutter\/THUMBNAIL_260115_WC_CE_TOILET_CLEANING_ES\/THUMBNAIL_260115_WC_CE_TOILET_CLEANING_ES--square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale&width=350)\n- 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Boilerpipe Text	Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Strategies By acting on his own, President Trump has broken with more than 200 years of U.S. history in which Congress set the direction of trade policy. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war have begun. Credit... Eric Lee/The New York Times April 11, 2025 If the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before. That’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I called him for perspective. He told me that what we were experiencing was way outside the historical norm. One man alone has risked the first global trade war since the 1930s by raising tariffs to levels unseen for more than a century. The president’s actions, he said, represent a “big break with history.” Even if Mr. Trump removes the tariffs — he announced a 90-day pause for some of the highest ones on Wednesday, while keeping a 10 percent base line for virtually all imports from around the world — his go-it-alone stance is a major departure. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war, a dreaded relic of the Great Depression, have begun in the 21st century. The consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high. They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States — all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president of the United States. Until now, it had always taken decades of consensus building to bend the trajectory of trade policy, Professor Irwin said. When the country changed course in earlier times, Congress played the dominant role. Even when it began delegating authority to negotiate trade deals to the president in the 1930s, Congress set the direction of U.S. tariffs: downward. Now, it’s unquestionably the president who has taken the United States on a new and hazardous path. “This is of historical significance,” Professor Irwin said. In the past, wars provided the impetus for change. The Civil War and World War I led to higher tariffs enacted by Congress after lengthy discussion, and those were “big breaks” with history, Professor Irwin said. Tariffs began falling in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and with some exceptions, including the Biden and first Trump administrations, they remained fairly low. “But here we are, in a peacetime economy,” Professor Irwin said. “We’re basically at full employment, 4 percent. There’s no societal consensus that there’s a big problem with trade, and yet we have one person, the president, radically changing the direction of U.S. trade policy.” The Fallout Stock markets have been swirling — falling for days, then leaping in delight on Wednesday at news that some of the U.S. tariffs had been delayed. It was the biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis of 2008 , with the benchmark S&P 500 stock index rising 9.5 percent and erasing some of the losses that investors have had to endure this year. By Thursday, though, the enthusiasm had ebbed. The S&P 500 fell 3.5 percent for the day, only to rise 1.8 percent on Friday. Whether the markets keep rallying, or sink back into a maelstrom of worry, is likely to depend on what Mr. Trump does about the direction of tariff policy, which economists view, in an overwhelming consensus, as wrongheaded and profoundly dangerous. Until Wednesday, the president’s series of tariff announcements had set off expectations of sharply rising prices for households and businesses alike, raising a strong possibility that a spreading global trade war could send the U.S. economy spiraling into a recession and cause vast human hardship. Image Stock markets have been swirling since President Trump announced his “reciprocal” tariffs this month. Credit... Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times After the president said he was delaying some tariffs, Goldman Sachs abruptly dropped its forecast that a recession was likely. Even so, the Goldman prognosis was bleak: “We are reverting to our previous non-recession base-line forecast with G.D.P. growth of 0.5 percent and a 45 percent probability of recession.” China has retaliated with tariffs of its own. By Thursday, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods had reached 145 percent; China reciprocated with tariffs on U.S. products, raising them on Friday to 125 percent. Negotiations were underway with many countries — but not China — the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. “Do not retaliate,” he said, “and you will be rewarded.” The European Union said it would delay its plans for retaliation for 90 days. Congressional resistance to the Trump trade policy has begun, with a mainly Democratic effort in the Senate to end the “ national emergency ” that the president declared as the legal justification for his tariffs. But as my colleague Ana Swanson wrote, the odds against such an effort’s succeeding quickly are high. Even if it passed in the Senate, it’s not clear that a resolution to roll back the tariffs would ever reach the House floor. If it did, and passed there, Mr. Trump could veto it, and overriding a veto with a two-thirds vote isn’t likely in the current political firmament. The Sweep of History As unusual as the Trump administration’s swerves on tariffs have been, they are possible only because Congress has been delegating authority on trade policy to the president in stages, starting in 1934. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution expressly reserves for Congress the power to impose tariffs. Congressional dominance over trade policy shifted substantially after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 ushered in the catastrophic global trade war and worsened the Great Depression. Then, as now, economists overwhelmingly opposed a tariff increase, imploring President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law, but he did anyway. That disastrous legislation was a product of what historians call congressional “logrolling” — the trading of votes by legislators to secure favorable action on projects of interest to each one — that had largely determined trade policy. U.S. tariffs in the 1930s increased for domestic reasons — largely, to protect local industry — without much advance thought about the global consequences. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that the tariffs were major factors in a dire turn in world history, said Dale Copeland, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. In the 1930s, Britain and France turned inward and focused their commerce within their imperial empires, while the United States, a nascent power, had a sphere of influence of its own, Professor Copeland said. Japan did not yet have such an empire. It set about acquiring one in China and in Southeast Asia, at least in part, because within a year of the enactment of Smoot-Hawley, Japan had “lost most of its trade” and decided that it needed “other ways to get supplies of raw materials and oil and other important things,” Professor Copeland said. Tariff barriers created enormous international tensions and perverse incentives, lessons that “the world has already learned, and may need to relearn now,” he said. Ed Clissold, senior U.S. strategist at Ned Davis Research, an independent financial research firm, said the geopolitical implications of rising tariffs needed to be studied closely. “If we cut off trade with China and raise tariffs on other countries in the region, China’s going to focus even more heavily in Southeast Asia,” he said. Emily Bowersock Hill, chief executive of Bowersock Capital Partners, a wealth management firm in Lawrence, Kan., said that without checks on his behavior, Mr. Trump was making erratic geopolitical moves. “It’s taken decades to establish the reputation of the United States around the world,” she said. “Our reputation, our alliances, our brand were a primary advantage. It wouldn’t take much to lose all of that.” The U.S. presidency has always been powerful, but in the past, presidents were hemmed in by law, custom and politics. As the wild swings of recent days show, however, Mr. Trump is unaffected by most of those restraints. More than in the past, the direction of the markets and the global economy depends on the mood of the president. A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2025 , Section BU, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: This Trade War Is Different From All Others . Order Reprints \| Today’s Paper \| Subscribe Related Content inEducation: Finance and Economics New York Times inEducation has been designed as a resource to connect Times journalism with key areas of study for students and faculty through our Education Subscription Program. If you are affiliated with a U.S. college, visit accessnyt.com to learn if your institution provides New York Times access. Others should inquire with their school or local library. If you are a faculty or staff member interested in bringing The New York Times to your school, visit the Group Subscriptions Page. Jacqueline Gu/The New York Times Mojo Wang Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More in Business Imani Khayyam for The New York Times Oliver Farshi for The New York Times Scott McIntyre for The New York Times DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times Editors’ Picks Illustration by Tomi Um Peter White/Getty Images Trending in The Times Bobbi Lin for The New York Times Kenny Holston/The New York Times . Andy Fraser Miguel Porlan Butch Dill/Associated Press Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Coast Guard District Southwestern Mindanao Juan Bautista Climént Palmer Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Markdown	[Skip to content](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#site-content)[Skip to site index](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#site-index) Search & Section Navigation Section Navigation Search [Business](https://www.nytimes.com/section/business) [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fsubscription%2Fonboarding-offer%3FcampaignId%3D7JFJX%26EXIT_URI%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.nytimes.com%252F2025%252F04%252F11%252Fbusiness%252Ftariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html&asset=masthead) Wednesday, January 28, 2026 [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) Global Economy - [Price of Gold Soars](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/business/gold-prices.html) - [Record Debt](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/business/economy/government-debt-bonds.html) - [Japan Raises Interest Rates](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/business/bank-of-japan-rates-inflation.html) - [I.M.F. Prods China](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/business/imf-china-currency.html) Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#after-top) Supported by [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#after-sponsor) Strategies # How This Trade War Is Different From All Other Trade Wars By acting on his own, President Trump has broken with more than 200 years of U.S. history in which Congress set the direction of trade policy. - Share full article - 185 ![A close-up of President Trump's hands holding a pen. He is wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/04/13/multimedia/11biz-strategies-qzpj/11biz-strategies-qzpj-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war have begun.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times [![Jeff Sommer](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/20/multimedia/author-jeff-sommer/author-jeff-sommer-thumbLarge-v2.png)](https://www.nytimes.com/by/jeff-sommer) By [Jeff Sommer](https://www.nytimes.com/by/jeff-sommer) Jeff Sommer writes [Strategies](https://www.nytimes.com/column/business-strategies), a weekly column on markets, finance and the economy. April 11, 2025 If the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before. That’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I called him for perspective. He told me that what we were experiencing was way outside the historical norm. One man alone has risked the first global trade war since the 1930s by raising tariffs to levels unseen for more than a century. The president’s actions, he said, represent a “big break with history.” Even if Mr. Trump removes the tariffs — he announced a 90-day pause for some of the highest ones on Wednesday, while keeping a 10 percent base line for virtually all imports from around the world — his go-it-alone stance is a major departure. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war, a dreaded relic of the Great Depression, have begun in the 21st century. The consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high. They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States — all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president of the United States. Until now, it had always taken decades of consensus building to bend the trajectory of trade policy, Professor Irwin said. When the country changed course in earlier times, Congress played the dominant role. Even when it began delegating authority to negotiate trade deals to the president in the 1930s, Congress set the direction of U.S. tariffs: downward. Now, it’s unquestionably the president who has taken the United States on a new and hazardous path. “This is of historical significance,” Professor Irwin said. In the past, wars provided the impetus for change. The Civil War and World War I led to higher tariffs enacted by Congress after lengthy discussion, and those were “big breaks” with history, Professor Irwin said. Tariffs began falling in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and with some exceptions, including the Biden and first Trump administrations, they remained fairly low. “But here we are, in a peacetime economy,” Professor Irwin said. “We’re basically at full employment, 4 percent. There’s no societal consensus that there’s a big problem with trade, and yet we have one person, the president, radically changing the direction of U.S. trade policy.” ## The Fallout Stock markets have been swirling — falling for days, then leaping in delight on Wednesday at news that some of the U.S. tariffs had been delayed. It was the biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis [of 2008](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/08/business/trump-tariffs-stock-market/heres-the-latest?smid=url-share), with the benchmark S\&P 500 stock index rising 9.5 percent and erasing some of the losses that investors have had to endure this year. By Thursday, though, the enthusiasm had ebbed. The S\&P 500 fell 3.5 percent for the day, only to rise 1.8 percent on Friday. ## Editors’ Picks [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/01/26/multimedia/WELL-ASK-COFFEE-MOOD1-mqtz/WELL-ASK-COFFEE-MOOD1-mqtz-thumbLarge.jpg)Can Coffee Really Boost Your Mood?](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/well/coffee-mood-boost.html) [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/01/23/multimedia/23OpenThread-vkcq/23OpenThread-vkcq-thumbLarge.jpg)Can I Wear a Sweatshirt to Work?](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/fashion/sweatshirt-hoodie-work-office.html) [![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2026/01/27/multimedia/27TBR-Zengerle-Review-czqv/27TBR-Zengerle-Review-czqv-thumbLarge.jpg)How Did Tucker Carlson Get This Way? How Did America?](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/books/review/hated-by-all-the-right-people-jason-zengerle.html) Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#after-pp_edpick) Whether the markets keep rallying, or sink back into a maelstrom of worry, is likely to depend on what Mr. Trump does about the direction of tariff policy, which economists view, in an overwhelming consensus, as wrongheaded and profoundly dangerous. Until Wednesday, the president’s series of tariff announcements had set off expectations of sharply rising prices for households and businesses alike, raising a strong possibility that a spreading global trade war could send the U.S. economy spiraling into a recession and cause vast human hardship. Image ![A trader looking at a computer screen, with screens listing stock prices above him.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/04/13/multimedia/11biz-strategies-pwhj/11biz-strategies-pwhj-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Stock markets have been swirling since President Trump announced his “reciprocal” tariffs this month.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times After the president said he was delaying some tariffs, Goldman Sachs abruptly dropped its forecast that a recession was likely. Even so, the Goldman prognosis was bleak: “We are reverting to our previous non-recession base-line forecast with G.D.P. growth of 0.5 percent and a 45 percent probability of recession.” China has retaliated with tariffs of its own. By Thursday, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods had [reached](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/10/business/trump-tariffs-stocks) 145 percent; China reciprocated with tariffs on U.S. products, raising them on Friday to 125 percent. Negotiations were underway with many countries — but not China — the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. “Do not retaliate,” he said, “and you will be rewarded.” The European Union said it would delay its plans for retaliation for 90 days. Congressional resistance to the Trump trade policy has begun, with a mainly Democratic effort in the Senate to end the “[national emergency](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits/)” that the president declared as the legal justification for his tariffs. But as my colleague [Ana Swanson](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/08/us/trump-news-tariffs/40390ebc-a984-5f36-8ce7-b76740d860dc?smid=url-share) wrote, the odds against such an effort’s succeeding quickly are high. Even if it passed in the Senate, it’s not clear that a resolution to roll back the tariffs would ever reach the House floor. If it did, and passed there, Mr. Trump could veto it, and overriding a veto with a two-thirds vote isn’t likely in the current political firmament. ## The Sweep of History As unusual as the Trump administration’s swerves on tariffs have been, they are possible only because Congress has been delegating authority on trade policy to the president in stages, starting in 1934. [Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution](https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i#article-section-8) expressly reserves for [Congress](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47679#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Constitution%20gives%20Congress,agreements%20outside%20of%20the%20treaty) the power to impose tariffs. Congressional dominance over trade policy shifted substantially after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 ushered in the catastrophic global trade war and worsened the Great Depression. Then, as now, economists overwhelmingly opposed a tariff increase, imploring President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law, but he did anyway. That disastrous legislation was a product of what historians call congressional “logrolling” — the trading of votes by legislators to secure favorable action on projects of interest to each one — that had largely determined trade policy. U.S. tariffs in the 1930s increased for domestic reasons — largely, to protect local industry — without much advance thought about the global consequences. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that the tariffs were major factors in a dire turn in world history, said Dale Copeland, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. In the 1930s, Britain and France turned inward and focused their commerce within their imperial empires, while the United States, a nascent power, had a sphere of influence of its own, Professor Copeland said. Japan did not yet have such an empire. It set about acquiring one in China and in Southeast Asia, at least in part, because within a year of the enactment of Smoot-Hawley, Japan had “lost most of its trade” and decided that it needed “other ways to get supplies of raw materials and oil and other important things,” Professor Copeland said. Tariff barriers created enormous international tensions and perverse incentives, lessons that “the world has already learned, and may need to relearn now,” he said. Ed Clissold, senior U.S. strategist at Ned Davis Research, an independent financial research firm, said the geopolitical implications of rising tariffs needed to be studied closely. “If we cut off trade with China and raise tariffs on other countries in the region, China’s going to focus even more heavily in Southeast Asia,” he said. Emily Bowersock Hill, chief executive of Bowersock Capital Partners, a wealth management firm in Lawrence, Kan., said that without checks on his behavior, Mr. Trump was making erratic geopolitical moves. “It’s taken decades to establish the reputation of the United States around the world,” she said. “Our reputation, our alliances, our brand were a primary advantage. It wouldn’t take much to lose all of that.” The U.S. presidency has always been powerful, but in the past, presidents were hemmed in by law, custom and politics. As the wild swings of recent days show, however, Mr. Trump is unaffected by most of those restraints. More than in the past, the direction of the markets and the global economy depends on the mood of the president. More Strategies Columns by Jeff Sommer [![]()The Fed Isn’t Rushing to Save the Markets This Time April 5, 2025](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/business/tariffs-stock-market-fed-inflation.html) [![]()In Worst Stock Market in Years, Slow and Boring Has Eased the Pain April 3, 2025](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/business/stock-market-investing-retirement-pain-stocks-bonds.html) [![]()Calm Your Investing Life: Own a Bit of Everything March 28, 2025](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/business/investing-international-stocks-bonds.html) [Jeff Sommer](https://www.nytimes.com/by/jeff-sommer) writes [Strategies](https://www.nytimes.com/column/business-strategies), a weekly column on markets, finance and the economy. A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2025, Section BU, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: This Trade War Is Different From All Others. [Order Reprints](https://nytimes.wrightsmedia.com/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY) Read 185 comments - Share full article - 185 ## Related Content ### [inEducation: Finance and Economics](https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/nytimesineducation-financeandeconomics) New York Times inEducation has been designed as a resource to connect Times journalism with key areas of study for students and faculty through our Education Subscription Program. If you are affiliated with a U.S. college, visit accessnyt.com to learn if your institution provides New York Times access. Others should inquire with their school or local library. 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Readable Markdown	Advertisement [SKIP ADVERTISEMENT](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/tariffs-trump-markets-history-trade-wars.html#after-top) Strategies By acting on his own, President Trump has broken with more than 200 years of U.S. history in which Congress set the direction of trade policy. ![A close-up of President Trump's hands holding a pen. He is wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/04/13/multimedia/11biz-strategies-qzpj/11biz-strategies-qzpj-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war have begun.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times April 11, 2025 If the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before. That’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I called him for perspective. He told me that what we were experiencing was way outside the historical norm. One man alone has risked the first global trade war since the 1930s by raising tariffs to levels unseen for more than a century. The president’s actions, he said, represent a “big break with history.” Even if Mr. Trump removes the tariffs — he announced a 90-day pause for some of the highest ones on Wednesday, while keeping a 10 percent base line for virtually all imports from around the world — his go-it-alone stance is a major departure. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war, a dreaded relic of the Great Depression, have begun in the 21st century. The consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high. They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States — all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president of the United States. Until now, it had always taken decades of consensus building to bend the trajectory of trade policy, Professor Irwin said. When the country changed course in earlier times, Congress played the dominant role. Even when it began delegating authority to negotiate trade deals to the president in the 1930s, Congress set the direction of U.S. tariffs: downward. Now, it’s unquestionably the president who has taken the United States on a new and hazardous path. “This is of historical significance,” Professor Irwin said. In the past, wars provided the impetus for change. The Civil War and World War I led to higher tariffs enacted by Congress after lengthy discussion, and those were “big breaks” with history, Professor Irwin said. Tariffs began falling in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and with some exceptions, including the Biden and first Trump administrations, they remained fairly low. “But here we are, in a peacetime economy,” Professor Irwin said. “We’re basically at full employment, 4 percent. There’s no societal consensus that there’s a big problem with trade, and yet we have one person, the president, radically changing the direction of U.S. trade policy.” ## The Fallout Stock markets have been swirling — falling for days, then leaping in delight on Wednesday at news that some of the U.S. tariffs had been delayed. It was the biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis [of 2008](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/08/business/trump-tariffs-stock-market/heres-the-latest?smid=url-share), with the benchmark S\&P 500 stock index rising 9.5 percent and erasing some of the losses that investors have had to endure this year. By Thursday, though, the enthusiasm had ebbed. The S\&P 500 fell 3.5 percent for the day, only to rise 1.8 percent on Friday. Whether the markets keep rallying, or sink back into a maelstrom of worry, is likely to depend on what Mr. Trump does about the direction of tariff policy, which economists view, in an overwhelming consensus, as wrongheaded and profoundly dangerous. Until Wednesday, the president’s series of tariff announcements had set off expectations of sharply rising prices for households and businesses alike, raising a strong possibility that a spreading global trade war could send the U.S. economy spiraling into a recession and cause vast human hardship. Image ![A trader looking at a computer screen, with screens listing stock prices above him.](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/04/13/multimedia/11biz-strategies-pwhj/11biz-strategies-pwhj-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale) Stock markets have been swirling since President Trump announced his “reciprocal” tariffs this month.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times After the president said he was delaying some tariffs, Goldman Sachs abruptly dropped its forecast that a recession was likely. Even so, the Goldman prognosis was bleak: “We are reverting to our previous non-recession base-line forecast with G.D.P. growth of 0.5 percent and a 45 percent probability of recession.” China has retaliated with tariffs of its own. By Thursday, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods had [reached](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/10/business/trump-tariffs-stocks) 145 percent; China reciprocated with tariffs on U.S. products, raising them on Friday to 125 percent. Negotiations were underway with many countries — but not China — the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. “Do not retaliate,” he said, “and you will be rewarded.” The European Union said it would delay its plans for retaliation for 90 days. Congressional resistance to the Trump trade policy has begun, with a mainly Democratic effort in the Senate to end the “[national emergency](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits/)” that the president declared as the legal justification for his tariffs. But as my colleague [Ana Swanson](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/08/us/trump-news-tariffs/40390ebc-a984-5f36-8ce7-b76740d860dc?smid=url-share) wrote, the odds against such an effort’s succeeding quickly are high. Even if it passed in the Senate, it’s not clear that a resolution to roll back the tariffs would ever reach the House floor. If it did, and passed there, Mr. Trump could veto it, and overriding a veto with a two-thirds vote isn’t likely in the current political firmament. ## The Sweep of History As unusual as the Trump administration’s swerves on tariffs have been, they are possible only because Congress has been delegating authority on trade policy to the president in stages, starting in 1934. [Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution](https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i#article-section-8) expressly reserves for [Congress](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47679#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Constitution%20gives%20Congress,agreements%20outside%20of%20the%20treaty) the power to impose tariffs. Congressional dominance over trade policy shifted substantially after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 ushered in the catastrophic global trade war and worsened the Great Depression. Then, as now, economists overwhelmingly opposed a tariff increase, imploring President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law, but he did anyway. That disastrous legislation was a product of what historians call congressional “logrolling” — the trading of votes by legislators to secure favorable action on projects of interest to each one — that had largely determined trade policy. U.S. tariffs in the 1930s increased for domestic reasons — largely, to protect local industry — without much advance thought about the global consequences. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that the tariffs were major factors in a dire turn in world history, said Dale Copeland, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. In the 1930s, Britain and France turned inward and focused their commerce within their imperial empires, while the United States, a nascent power, had a sphere of influence of its own, Professor Copeland said. Japan did not yet have such an empire. It set about acquiring one in China and in Southeast Asia, at least in part, because within a year of the enactment of Smoot-Hawley, Japan had “lost most of its trade” and decided that it needed “other ways to get supplies of raw materials and oil and other important things,” Professor Copeland said. Tariff barriers created enormous international tensions and perverse incentives, lessons that “the world has already learned, and may need to relearn now,” he said. Ed Clissold, senior U.S. strategist at Ned Davis Research, an independent financial research firm, said the geopolitical implications of rising tariffs needed to be studied closely. “If we cut off trade with China and raise tariffs on other countries in the region, China’s going to focus even more heavily in Southeast Asia,” he said. Emily Bowersock Hill, chief executive of Bowersock Capital Partners, a wealth management firm in Lawrence, Kan., said that without checks on his behavior, Mr. Trump was making erratic geopolitical moves. “It’s taken decades to establish the reputation of the United States around the world,” she said. “Our reputation, our alliances, our brand were a primary advantage. It wouldn’t take much to lose all of that.” The U.S. presidency has always been powerful, but in the past, presidents were hemmed in by law, custom and politics. As the wild swings of recent days show, however, Mr. Trump is unaffected by most of those restraints. More than in the past, the direction of the markets and the global economy depends on the mood of the president. A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2025, Section BU, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: This Trade War Is Different From All Others. [Order Reprints](https://nytimes.wrightsmedia.com/) \\| [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) \\| [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY) ## Related Content [inEducation: Finance and Economics](https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/nytimesineducation-financeandeconomics) New York Times inEducation has been designed as a resource to connect Times journalism with key areas of study for students and faculty through our Education Subscription Program. If you are affiliated with a U.S. college, visit accessnyt.com to learn if your institution provides New York Times access. Others should inquire with their school or local library. 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