‘Economists have been flabbergasted’ at how White House calculated tariffs

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced sweeping new tariffs on imports to the United States from countries right across the globe. “Some economists have figured out how these tariffs were calculated by the White House and its team,” said FRANCE 24’s Washington DC correspondent Fraser Jackson. “These economists have been flabbergasted at how cumbersome these equations are, saying the US took the trade deficit that it has with a given country and divided it by the imports from that country, which is a very clunky way of doing things and not as surgical as you would expect.”