Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big-picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, April 27th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation,

come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly

slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, well, it will surprise you not at all

that the discourse continues to be squarely focused on Trump's tariffs, and today we here at the

breakdown have done the impossible. We have found a piece that sort of strikes a middle-of-the-line

tone around them, or at least extrapolates out and talks about the larger context rather than just

focusing on the numbers

themselves. The piece is by well-known thinker and Carnegie Endowment Senior Associate Michael

Pettus. It's called the global trading system was already broken. Now it's subtitle, but there's a

better way to fix it than a reckless tariff regime, gives you a sense of where Michael is headed,

but it still gets at some important points. So let's turn it over to an AI version of myself for this fairly long read, and then we'll come

back with a quick wrap-up.

The sweeping tariffs announced by U.S. President Donald Trump on April 2nd, along with the

subsequent postponements and retaliations, have unleashed an enormous amount of global uncertainty.

Much of the world's attention is on the chaotic short-term consequences of these policies,

wild stock market fluctuations, concerns about the U.S. bond market, fears of a recession,

and speculation about how different countries will negotiate or react.

But whatever happens in the near term, this much is clear. Trump's policies

...