Also today, President Trump signed orders to impose 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports to the U.S.

Two key American allies, Canada and Mexico, would be significantly impacted, but so would American businesses and consumers.

For more, I'm joined by Greg Epp, Chief Economics commentator at the Wall Street Journal.

Greg, welcome back. It's good to see you. Let's start with this announcement then of 25% steel and aluminum tariffs.

A few days ago, you wrote in your column that the early verdict on tariffs was bad economics,

better politics. Does this latest announcement here fit in with that pattern?

Well, only time will tell, but we'll have to sort of see what happens with this. We know from

Trump's first term that when he imposed similar tariffs on steel and aluminum, the result was to

create some additional domestic production and jobs in the

steel and aluminum industries, but to significantly raise costs and cause a lot of harm in the

industries that consume steel and aluminum. And that harm was compounded when our trading partners

retaliated against those tariffs. And so the net effect

was an economic negative. Now, fast forward to today, when President Trump a week earlier said

that he was going to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, we saw a very negative

reaction in the stock market. That too suggests that investors expect that the net effect on this economy of these tariffs

will be negative.

We should point out too that there's an intention here to target China in some way.

China is not one of the top steel or aluminum suppliers to the US and there are already

existing tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum, even from the

previous administration. So how would this latest potential move here? How could that impact

China? So I think that certainly Trump's first administration and to some extent the Biden

administration made a distinction between China and everybody else. There was a recognition

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