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Has there ever been a time in history when a superpower as economically huge as the U.S. implemented major tariffs?
Personally my take is that while economists are very intelligent and have put a lot of thought into these things, there really just isn't any way to know exactly what will happen. Tariffs could lead to:
There are just so many possibilities, and even with all the statistics and math in the world I genuinely don't think any economist has a great idea how things will shake out. The global market is one of the most complex systems in existance.
Either way, it's a high variance move and as others have said, it allows Trump a TON of leverage when negotiating with our allies. Personally I'm very curious to see what comes of all this.
Jacking up the tariffs in 1930 likely caused the Great depression. Other countries retaliated, international trade slowed down, companies reliant on exports for large part of revenue started losing money, market panicked, which led to more interventions in the economy, so on and on...
Meynard Keynes arguably predicted the Great Depression in 1919 by forecasting the obvious inability of the Germans to pay back their crushing war reparations and the economic fallout that would ensue. Tariffs might have impacted things but I choose to believe that the Depression was mostly baked in since 1919 (since correct predictions are cool).
Germany paid almost none of the reparations. Less than 1/6 of the 130 billion marks were paid by 1930 (after which payments were paused, then indefinitely deferred due to the great depression), almost all by American banks which Germany never paid back. (N.b. only 50B (the A and B bonds) were required to be paid.) If you calculate for inflation etc. the US actually paid Germany significantly more than in the Marshall plan after!
For comparison, after the Franco-Prussian war, France received a similar proportion of GDP, had its banks finance it within a month then paid them off within 3 years. The German Empire (the Weimar state's actual name) via Havenstein instead chose to call a general strike and hyperinflate its currency to erase local war debts the government owed to German citizens and banks.
Also, the great depression started when the US stock market crashed, spreading elsewhere.
Yes this seems Bad For The Economy
Certainly. But am I wrong that Germany rug-pulling US banks and investors (and the European economy performing poorly due to the issues you mention, along with the occupation of the Ruhr) was bad for American speculators? And "overspeculation" was a leading cause of the 1929 stock market crash, wasn't it?
How did this impact the German economy if it never circulated (neither entered nor left it)?
I assume it was bad for the German economy because it made banks less likely to lend to them, drying up credit. (Plus the whole part where the French got irritated by the lack of repayment and seized some of their territory.)
We're literally talking about the opposite situation!
American banks gave Germany perhaps 4x as much as the 20 years later Marshall plan. Some was from the reparations (Dawes and Young plans) they bankrolled, without being paid back, which did not circulate in the German economy, but they loaned and invested even more (about $5 billion/year in the late 1920s, more than Germany (American bankers) paid in reparations in total (for comparison, in dollars, the total original reparation sum was $30 billion) which helped Germany grow production 30% above 1914 levels, with the 2nd largest industry in the world.)
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