Here Meadway draws parallels between Trumps tarrifs and Volcker’s interest rate shock in the 1970ies. Is this justified considering the world economy has a totally different structure today?
There is another argument that what Trump actually wants is a reactionary economic policy more similar to the 19th century where interests of small, wealthy, powerful groups were dominant over the well-being of normal people. For how much of a difference that can make, Germanys rapid economic development which was then to a large part attributed to Ludwig Erhard, Germanys minister for economic affairs from 1949 to 1963.
Destroy domestic manufacturing by enacting insane tariffs on the raw materials it depends on, without any nontrivial increase in manufacturing to counterbalance the pain, even in the long run.
This type of command economy “might makes right” stuff can fail catastrophically. As recently as the 1990s, there were people starving in North Korea by the hundreds of thousands (at least) because someone decided that enforcing his will was more important than listening to people who even on the most rudimentary level knew what they were doing.