Will Trump’s Tariffs Trigger a Recession?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
The staff writer John Cassidy joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the recent meltdown of the U.S. stock market, Donald Trump’s long-standing support for tariffs, and what the potential death of an American-dominated free-trade system could mean for the global economy.
This week’s reading:
- “Will Trumpian Uncertainty Knock the Economy Into a Recession?,” by John Cassidy
- “Who Gets to Determine Greenland’s Future?,” by Louise Bokkenheuser
- “What’s Next for Ukraine?,” by Joshua Yaffa
- “Canada, the Northern Outpost of Sanity,” by Bill McKibben
- “Can Americans Still Be Convinced That Principle Is Worth Fighting For?,” by Jay Caspian Kang
- “Donald Trump's A.I. Propaganda,” by Kyle Chayka
To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, John, thanks for being here. |
| 0:08.9 | Thanks very much for inviting me on. |
| 0:10.9 | So it's Tuesday morning, and Wall Street had its worst day of 2025 on Monday, with the Dow falling by nearly 900 points. |
| 0:20.2 | What exactly set this off? |
| 0:22.6 | Well, it's all part of the Trump tariff story, I think. If you can look back at the stock |
| 0:26.5 | market since the middle of February when it became clear that Trump was serious about |
| 0:30.7 | these tariffs, a lot of people on Wall Street thought he was bluffing, I think. But once he |
| 0:34.5 | made the first big announcement to put tariffs know, put tariffs on Canada and Mexico |
| 0:38.3 | and China, the market started diving. And it's pretty much been diving up and down ever since. |
| 0:43.3 | It's falling again today now that Trump's made another threat. So I think the market basically |
| 0:49.2 | went into the Trump administration thinking there's going to be some bumps, but ultimately |
| 0:53.9 | Trump's |
| 0:54.4 | a bluffer. He's not serious about it. And what's happening since then is people have been |
| 0:58.4 | reassessing. And what you've seen basically is the huge rise in the stock market, ever since |
| 1:03.1 | it looked like Trump was going to be elected, has now been totally reversed. John Cassidy is |
| 1:09.7 | the New Yorker's economics expert. |
| 1:12.1 | And today, with a global trade war brewing, the world's economy appears to be on the brink of collapse. |
| 1:18.5 | John's here today to talk about Trump's obsession with tariffs, the death of free trade, |
| 1:22.6 | and whether Republicans are actually willing to throw the economy into a recession. |
| 1:27.1 | We're listening to the political scene. |
| 1:29.3 | I'm Tyler Foggett and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. |
| 1:41.3 | So what is it that actually kind of convinced everyone that Trump is, in fact, serious about the tariffs? |
... |
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