Opinii

Donald Trump announced on the night of April 2 to 3, 2025 what he had been telling us since the election campaign: that he would impose tariffs on all countries with which the United States has trade deficits.

The world didn't really believe that Donald Trump would actually take action, so the announcement on the morning of April 3rd took many by surprise.

But Donald Trump has been consistent with his plans and has also been, it must be said, fair to those who voted for him. He has promised these tariffs through which he believes he will bring back to the United States the jobs lost in recent decades in favor, especially of Asia.

We are thus entering a new era in the history of the world economy. Globalization as we know it, with a trend of flattening customs tariffs between countries of the world that has been widespread in recent decades, is not a given.

The worst thing is that it was the United States and its Euro-Atlantic partners who pushed enormously, after World War II, towards a world of increasingly lower tariffs: these were the so-called GATT Rounds - General Agreements on Trade & Tariffs, where negotiations between the developed and less developed countries of the world were intense over the decades, and finally led to the World Trade Organization, where China and Russia were also convinced to join, although they viewed this organization with very reserved eyes. Historically, less industrially developed countries have sought to protect and encourage their own production through tariffs on imports of industrial products, while developed countries have always demanded free trade.

And here is how today, April 3, 2025, after almost 80 years since the Anglo-Saxon world in particular fought for the lowest possible tariffs between the countries of the world, for a so-called "flat" world, for the global village, here is how the United States, which holds 27% of the world's GDP, has today come to the conclusion that it is necessary to protect itself and its economy from too cheap goods from other countries, primarily from Asia.

In fact, the issue is simple. Do you want to buy cheaply and from anywhere, or do you decide to support your national production and accept to buy expensively only from your own country - and possibly poorly, lower quality goods - as was the case before '89 in Romania.

Romania then went exactly the opposite way, from a country where 95% of what was consumed was from local production because it tried to pay its foreign debts - and it paid them by restricting the external consumption of products - so it went from a maximum of local consumption, which actually meant shortages, low quality of products and ultimately the suffering of the people, to extreme openness in just 10 years.

It moved to an economy that became completely open in seven or eight years, and since 2007 has had absolutely no tariffs with much more powerful countries in Western Europe.

Theoretically, most economists in the world say that the ideal is to have such tariffs as low as possible between countries, so that people benefit from a product at the best possible price and the best possible quality, but this may not be an ideal world, just as before '89 there was a system that wanted to be an ideal world, but which ultimately ended up being a world of shortages, cold and hunger for us, at least in the '80s.

What actually happened in the world after 1990? There were two forces: the democratic force and the force of the Internet. The democratic force leveled societies so that foreign investors - and until 1990 foreign investor = investors from Western Europe, the United States or Japan - were able to invest hundreds and thousands of billions of euros in previously inaccessible spaces, namely in Central and Eastern Europe, in China and other countries in Asia. The Internet also flattened the world.

China had a policy of attracting foreign investors, but in a very controlled manner, with the condition that foreign companies would only own 49% of the newly established organizations. China, in fact, some specialists say, learned from Romania to work with foreign investors, that is, to cooperate with companies from Western Europe following the example of Romania in the 1970s, when Romania formed partnerships with Western investors such as the French or Canadians, which led to the emergence of the Dacia Plant or the Cernavoda nuclear power plant. Cooperation without loss of control.

Until the 1980s, China was a closed country. Westerners were the ones who knocked on China's door and invested in the so-called free zones, and today China has reached 17% of the world's GDP, compared to 1% in the 1980s, when it was only known as a manufacturer of sneakers and pencils.

During this period, America practically lost its middle class, meaning the American worker who in the 60s and 70s worked in one of the great steel mills in Chicago or in an automobile factory and was able to support a family of four.

America is now a country where the labor market is shaped like an hourglass - the middle is very narrow, the base is low-paid jobs in retail or HoReCa, and at the top are IT specialists, bankers, doctors or lawyers. This is exactly the problem that Trump addressed and is trying to solve with these tariffs, to bring industrial jobs back to the United States. The question is whether he can do anything more, and at what cost, after two or three generations have already passed since the world set off on a completely different path.

Freedom of trade versus the development of a local industry is not a new contradiction, but a debate that has been going on since the first economic theories appeared. The British economist David Ricardo, in 1820, came and put this thesis on the table: the theory of comparative advantage. He said this: "if we have two economies like that of Great Britain and Portugal, it is better for global production, for the so-called global output, for Great Britain to specialize in the production of cloth where it is better at it and has a skilled workforce, and for Portugal in the production of wine, where it is better at it and has the geographical conditions". But in this way, Portugal will forever remain a wine producer, it will never learn physics, chemistry, mathematics to have industry..., say the critics of this model.

Over time, there have been theorists who have contradicted this idea and supported tariff protection, at least temporarily, for the construction of their own industrial bases. One of them was a Romanian economist who is quite strongly contested today, including for his extreme right-wing deviations in the interwar era, Mihail Manoilescu, whose theories were taken up by economists in Brazil, for example. This country developed an industrial base based on his ideas.

The fact is that there are two contradictory forces in the economy: on the one hand you want better and cheaper products, on the other hand, if these cheaper and better products come at the price of decimating millions or tens of millions of jobs as has happened in the United States in recent decades, at some point people might think differently.

America needs to grit its teeth today. No one will remember today that purchasing power increased in the past decades or that a T-shirt that cost $30 in the '60s became just $3 in the '80s.

People don't remember the good things, they remember the bad things more.

It remains to be seen in the long or medium term what consequences these tariffs will have.

But it must be said that America today lives massively from the service industry and hundreds of billions of dollars flow to the United States from all countries of the world from internet services, from platforms like Google, Facebook, Netflix, from advertising, from finance or simply from the sale of films. Moreover, these large companies like Facebook or Google are accused of not even declaring the income and profits actually made in European countries, including Romania.

Will we agree in Europe to pay double the price of a ticket to the cinema for American films if the European Union decides that American films should be overtaxed?

We are entering a period full of uncertainties, but what must be said is that, from every side if you look, it could be like the rabbi's story: everyone is convinced that they are right.

What remains though? The idea remains that, beyond markets, goods and services, consumption, there is a sense of belonging to a nation. And if someone wants to do good for their country, they may make mistakes, but the fact that they do it in the name of this idea is still a gain to move forward. Solutions will/will be found to move forward.