Thank you very much. I’m very honored to be here this afternoon and really thank Barbara and Bob for inviting me to talk with you today.
We have a very useful question here: as we think about the Trump administration’s tariff increases this year and try to understand its likely impacts, economic modeling helps. Polling helps, as do reports from businesses and official data. But we have no recent experience with similar here or elsewhere. Is it possible then to draw lessons from the further past?
The last general U.S. tariff increase, the Tariff Act of 1930 — typically known as the “Smoot-Hawley Tariff” for its Congressional authors, Senator Reed Smoot and Rep. Willis Hawley — dates back 95 years. With some cautions I’ll note in a second, I’d like to pose four questions that can help us compare them:
