I don't know if you knew this already, but this week marks one year since U.S. President

Donald Trump's Liberation Day announcement.

Sweeping tariffs placed on countries across the world rocked economies everywhere.

We've been covering this anniversary all week on the FT News briefing, and so today for

Swamp Notes, we wanted to share a special conversation with the FTs U.S.

economics editor Claire Jones, who's been watching seemingly every detail of this story since last April.

Claire, welcome. Hi, Mark. All right, so we're recording this on April 2nd, 2026, exactly one year after

Trump's comments.

Claire, the days and weeks following the tariff announcement, what were some of the things that, you know, occurred to you that would need to be ironed out?

And one of the things that economists seem very unhappy about, which was the way in which the tariffs were calculated, they didn't think the rationale behind the methodology made sense.

They didn't think it necessarily followed the sort of paths that previous tariff policies had.

And it begged a lot of questions.

And one thing that economists really don't like is uncertainty. And

markets don't like that either, which I think explained the rather volatile reaction we saw

from stock indices in bond markets too. Claire, seemingly there had to be some economic advantage to these tariffs.

It was going to bring, in theory, or it did until the Supreme Court overruled these tariffs,

a lot of extra revenue for the United States government, yes?

I'd say you have to be careful there. An economic advantage isn't the same thing as a fiscal

advantage. But clearly there as a fiscal advantage.

But clearly there is a fiscal advantage to having these tariffs.

And we did see that reflected over the course of the year in the revenue raised by the tariffs.

And what would they have done?

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