"Liberation Day". Otherwise known as 2 April 2025, that was the day U.S. President Donald Trump waited until after the nation's stock markets had closed before announcing the tariffs the United States government would impose on the value of goods produced in other countries to the U.S. that he had campaigned for in the 2024 election.
During his announcement, President Trump displayed several charts indicating the size of the tariffs imposed by foreign governments on U.S.-produced goods and the reciprocal tariff rates the U.S. government would soon impose. The list was stunning, both for the magnitude of tariffs that would be imposed and number of countries and foreign territories that would be affected.
There was just one problem. The numbers didn't make sense, either from a mathematical standpoint or an economic one.
That wouldn't have been a problem if the foreign tariff rates presented on the charts matched the tariff rates those nations and regions impose on U.S. goods. Because they didn't, the reciprocal tariff rates being announced by President Trump also didn't make sense for how the administration described they were arrived at.
The numbers were strange enough that many mathematicians and economists went to the trouble of digging into where they were really coming from. In the following video, Matt Parker, the author of Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World, presents in the following video explainer:
Since there's no direct connection to actual tariff rates imposed by foreign countries on U.S. goods, the results of this reciprocal tariff math is instead signaling what the Trump administration really cares about. What that is boils down to the following list:
- The size of the trade deficit the United States has with other nations.
- Generating tariff revenue from all nations exporting goods to the U.S.
These things are much more about politics than they are about either maths or economics. The results of the reciprocal tariff math seems it was developed to produce a big, but not too big tariff number to negotiate around for the nations with which the U.S. has its biggest trade deficits, which is almost certainly the point of the exercise. Combined with the scope and scale of the "Liberation Day" tariffs, which even apply to foreign territories mainly inhabited by penguins, the real political message being sent by the Trump administration is there will be no escape for any nation from the newly announced minimum tariff of 10% and nations with whom the U.S. has large trade deficits will pay higher tariffs.
How those higher tariffs might be set however is up for negotiation and likely will be for quite some time.
We debated about whether to present a tool to do President Trump's reciprocal tariff math, but ultimately decided against doing so at this time because it's not a high value-added calculation. If you want to see which countries the U.S. has the biggest trade deficits with, you can get that information from official resources like the U.S. Census Bureau's Excel spreadsheet or sites that visualize that data like Brilliant Maps.
We'll close by presenting the video of President Trump's "Liberation Day" announcement, which we've queued to start from the beginning of his remarks.
The reciprocal tariff charts are brought out at about the 32-minute mark.
Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompts: "An editorial cartoon of a confused mathematician standing with their back to a classroom looking at a blank green chalkboard" and "Change the mathematician to an economist". We grafted the two images together to make the final cartoon.
Labels: economics, math, politics, trade
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