Episode
Remember Tariffs?
- Podcast
- Paul Krugman Podcast
- Published
- May 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 477
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/remember-tariffs
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Summary
Remember tariffs? They have not gone away. Hi, Paul Krugman with another video update from another cafe. You may remember that back in April 2025, which was seven years ago — well, actually just about one year ago, but it feels like longer — Donald Trump shocked us all with massive tariffs on basically everybody. It was an extraordinary policy move. It was also clearly illegal. It was also clearly really very stupid from the point of view of any kind of rational economic strategy. All of that seemed like the biggest thing in the world at the time. But of course it’s been overshadowed in the last 70 plus days by something new which was also illegal and massively stupid and even more so because it’s war. So the tariff issue has kind of receded in our perception. But it has not gone away. Since the initial imposition of tariffs, we’ve had a lot of action. Again, it would be the biggest thing in the world if it wasn’t for everything else that is going on. The whole legal basis of the tariffs was tossed out by the Supreme Court after having been ruled illegal by lower courts in several different hearings. The basis of the original tariffs was an obscure law called the International Economic Emergency Power Act, which clearly did not apply to the situation as of April 2025. When those tariffs were tossed, Trump responded or his people responded by invoking “Section 122.” I know there’s a lot of section numbers in all of this stuff and one question is what law are they sections of. and the answer is mostly they’re all different laws but anyway, 122 is for a balance of payments emergency. It allows a 10% tariff — lower than the IEEPA tariffs — but that was also clearly illegal, and a court has just ruled that it was illegal too. So now that will be appealed and there will be a…