Free Republic

Argentine President Javier Milei said during a Conservative event in Florida that his country was negotiating with Donald Trump's administration a zero-tariff deal on approximately 50 export products, aiming for a potential Free Trade Agreement (FTA) shortly. Milei's remarks came after the Republican leader slapped a 10% tariff on all Argentine goods as part of a broader protectionist policy. Speaking at the American Patriots Gala hosted by conservative groups Make America Clean Again and We Fund the Blue at Mar-a-Lago, where he received the “Lion of Liberty Award” for his commitment to freedom and free-market values, Milei outlined plans to...

Much like every other major story, the dying news media have managed to take a really interesting topic and thoroughly dumb it down to a limited set of monotonous slogans. In this case, variations of “tariffs hurt working people the most” and “the cost is passed onto consumers.”NBC News: “Trump’s new tariffs will hit lower-income households the hardest.”Associated Press: “Companies buying foreign products pay the tariffs imposed on them — and, as a result, face higher costs that are typically passed on to customers.”USA Today: “[S]ome economists predict Americans will feel the pain – at least in the short term...

The grand new American reawakening has come, Trump announced with his inaugural ‘Day of Liberation’—a Declaration of Economic Independence: [pic] Experts the world over are now butting heads over what this epochal ‘reciprocal tariffs’ package will mean for the world economy. Firstly, it must be said that the misnomered program is apparently not one of ‘reciprocal’ tariffs at all, but rather tariffs doing the job of balancing ‘unequal’ trade deficits between the US and other countries. As most know by now, Trump’s team apparently used a simple equation for determining the tariff rate: Flexport's team was able to reverse engineer...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is opposing President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs after spending his career in Washington, DC, trashing the nation’s decades-long free trade policy for allowing multinational corporations to easily outsource American jobs to low-wage countries like China and Vietnam. “As someone who helped lead the effort against disastrous unfettered free trade deals with China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries, I understand that we need trade policies that benefit American workers, not just the CEOs of large corporations,” Sanders said in a statement before using economic libertarian talking points to attack Trump’s recipricol tariffs:

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that California will look for ways to expand trade and persuade international partners to exempt the state from global payback as President Trump’s sweeping round of tariffs have sent U.S. and global financial markets tumbling.“Donald Trump’s tariffs do not represent all Americans,” Newsom said in a video posted Friday on the social media platform X. The 40 million residents of California, he said, live in “the tent pole of the US economy” that represents 14% of the nation’s GDP and is the fifth largest economy in the world.Newsom said he had directed his administration to...

President Donald Trump on Friday said he had a "productive" call with Vietnam's leader To Lam during which Lam offered to reduce tariffs on U.S. imports to his country."Just had a very productive call with To Lam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, who told me that Vietnam wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. "I thanked him on behalf of our Country, and said I look forward to a meeting in the near future."

President Donald Trump announced that Vietnam wants to drop tariffs on U.S. goods entirely if a deal can be struck between the countries.

President Javier Milei on Thursday announced that Argentina will readjust its internal regulations to meet the requirements of President Donald Trump’s tariff proposals. Milei, a career economist and the world’s first and only libertarian president at press time, made the announcement during a brief speech at the “American Patriots Gala,” an event organized by the “We Fund the Blue” charity organization at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “In this framework, and as a result of the meetings that Foreign Minister [Gerardo] Werthein had with the U.S. Department of State and the Secretary of Commerce, Argentina will move forward to...

Move over, Smoot and Hawley. President Trump has anointed himself America’s greatest protectionist, and he’s launching a global trade war to prove it. On Wednesday, Trump slapped a minimum 10 percent tariff on all imports, plus additional “reciprocal” tariffs on 60 other countries that have the temerity to sell us things we want to buy. He dubbed it “Liberation Day” to mark the freeing of Americans from the supposedly oppressive burden of trading with others.

In 1996, Nancy Pelosi stood at the House floor delivering a speech that would surprise many today. She fiercely opposed granting China Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status. But what’s shocking is how her stance back then echoes arguments often made by Donald Trump decades later. Pelosi’s speech was filled with concerns about unfair trade practices, a massive trade deficit, and the loss of American jobs to China. Pelosi questioned the fairness of the trade relationship, asking, “Is this reciprocal?” She pointed out the striking imbalance between what the U.S. was giving and what it was getting in return. Her...

EXCLUSIVE: California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans Friday morning directing the state to pursue "strategic" relationships with countries announcing retaliatory tariffs against the U.S., urging them to exclude California-made products from those taxes, Fox News Digital exclusively learned first. "Donald Trump's tariffs do not represent all Americans," Newsom said in a video announcement posted to X. "And on behalf of 40 million Americans that live in the great state of California, the tentpole of the U.S. economy … the dominant manufacturing state in America, our state of mind is around supporting stable trading relationships around the globe." Sources in Newsom's...

Wall Street kicked off Friday with another brutal stretch of losses driven by President Trump’s new tariffs despite stronger than expected March jobs data. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down more than 1,200 points shortly before 10:30 a.m. EDT Friday, a day after the market suffered its worse single-day of trading in five years. The S&P 500 index was down 3.6 percent, and the Nasdaq composite was down 3.5 percent. All three major indexes took serious losses Thursday, the first full day of trading after Trump’s announcement of up to $600 billion in new import taxes. The scale and...

It’s interesting to note that the average US MFN tariff on Chinese goods coming into the United States is 2%, whereas the average Chinese MFN tariff on US goods going into China is 35% Is that reciprocal in terms of jobs? This is the biggest and crulest hoax of all. The China trade supports 170,000 jobs in the United States. 170,000 jobs. Whereas our imports from China support 10 million jobs at least. The fact is that that US China trade is a job loser so my eyes are correct.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cautioned last month that Americans will likely experience "a detox period" after President Donald Trump implements his wide-ranging tariffs. What are we detoxing from, exactly? From an abundance of affordable goods and the world's highest living standards? From consistent economic growth? From leading the world in nearly every possible innovation and quantifiable economic measurement? From being an evolving manufacturing powerhouse? From enjoying an unprecedented per capita GDP or the low unemployment rates? The Trump administration suffers from Munchausen syndrome by tariff, prescribing toxic cures for mythical ailments to gain attention. That's something to remember as Trump...

Mark Cuban explains why 'strategic tariffs' if implemented properly could benefit the United States:Tara Palmeri: "Do you think these tariffs will impact everyone from the top down?"Mark Cuban: "If they're strategic: If China is subsidizing their steel industry, and we put… pic.twitter.com/03rPbeTuuT— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) April 3, 2025

Believing that a country is in bad shape if it imports more goods than it exports — i.e., if it has a trade deficit — is, in most cases, a harmless error in reasoning. It’s the sort of thing that seems to make sense at first glance, but any halfway decent economics professor can train it out of students in one or two lectures. That error in reasoning becomes harmful when the person who believes it is the president of the United States, and he is willing to claim emergency powers to act on it unilaterally. That’s what Donald Trump...

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - With the ink still fresh on U.S. President Donald Trump's latest batch of tariffs, some are already bracing for what may come next in his effort to strong-arm trading partners into doing his bidding. As the epicentre of the financial world and the issuer of the global reserve currency, the United States has a number of levers that Trump can pull to coerce other countries, from credit cards to the very provision of dollars to foreign banks. While deploying these unconventional weapons would come at a large cost for the U.S. itself and may even backfire altogether,...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it clear in an interview with CNN that the era of trade imbalances is over, and under President Trump, the U.S. will no longer tolerate unfair treatment. During a discussion with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Bessent confidently explained the administration’s position on tariffs and trade policy, signaling that Trump’s economic strategy is deliberate and well thought out. When pressed on how the administration’s policies could impact the auto industry, particularly regarding vehicles made with foreign parts, Bessent was blunt. “If half the cars coming into the United States are foreign-made, that's hard to turn around overnight,...

China Thursday urged the United States to immediately cancel its latest tariffs and vowed countermeasures to safeguard its own interests, after President Donald Trump declared sweeping levies on all U.S. trading partners around the world.The U.S. move disregards the balance of interests reached in multilateral trade negotiations over the years and the fact that it has long benefited greatly from international trade, the Chinese Commerce Ministry said in a statement.'SAFEGUARD RIGHTS & INTERESTS'"China firmly opposes this and will take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests," the ministry said, as the world's largest economies look set to spiral deeper...

One of the surprises out of Wednesday's big tariffs announcement was that the Trump administration used a surprisingly simplistic approach to calculating these much-hyped reciprocal tariffs. Why it matters: This was not a finely tuned set of import taxes calibrated to exert pressure on trading partners to adjust specific policies with which the U.S. has grievances. Rather, it was some simple arithmetic, based on overall trade data, that became the justification for the most sweeping U.S. duties in generations — a trade-weighted 22.5% tariff, per the Yale Budget Lab, up from around 2.4% last year. It implies fewer off-ramps for...