As President Donald Trump lights the global economy on fire in his bid to reduce America’s $1.2 trillion annual trade deficit, a few astute observers on X have uncovered the math that went into arriving at the tariffs that other countries charge the United States, which ultimately led to the reciprocal tariffs that the US will now be imposing on them.
What Happened: A post questioned Trump’s credibility on the subject of tariffs. James Surowiecki, a writer for The Atlantic and Fast Company had a tough time making sense of some of the figures shared by the White House on Wednesday evening, especially those about tariffs imposed by other countries on American exports.
He knew something wasn’t adding up, since South Korea, a country with which the US has a trade agreement was not charging 50% tariffs on US exports, as reported in the graphic released by the White House. After initially chalking it all up to made-up figures, he soon arrived at the absurd calculations that went into them.
See More: Trump Imposes Tariffs On Uninhabited Islands And Remote Locations: World Bank Data Raises Questions
Surowiecki says that the tariff figures were calculated by merely dividing the US’ trade deficit with a particular country by the said country’s total exports to the U.S. He even went on to illustrate it by giving the example of Indonesia, on which Trump now plans to impose 32% reciprocal tariffs.
He further adds ‘I cannot believe they decided to just divide the trade deficit by imports and tell people that’s the tariff rate,’ and wonders how U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed off on something like this.
Why It Matters: Others are now waking up to these calculations, such as the popular X finance influencer Geiger Capital, and the Sri Lankan publication Economynext, which questioned how the U.S. figures were calculated.
Neither the White House nor the United States Trade Representative responded to Benzinga’s request for comments on this story at the time of writing.
The tariff announcements led to the U.S. futures tanking at the time of writing. The Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were seen 2.5% lower at 41,433 while the Nasdaq dropped 3.45% at 19,076.75.
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