Hello and welcome to Brokonomics. Now, in this episode, I have hastily put together something on the question of Tariffs.

Tariffs popped up last night and I thought, let's move things around a bit on the Brokeonomic schedule and get an explainer on Tariffs up nice and quick.

I want to try and go through the full picture. I did have a bit of a stab at this on the podcast.

There's really only so much you can get through in a 20 minute segment, especially of Harry's on.

So I thought it needed a full Brokonomics as well to kind of really dive into the question at hand.

So I'm going to try and cover all the angles here, the reaction, why it happened, how they

work, the executive order, all that kind of thing.

And we should come away from this one with a decent understanding of why this is happening,

what is happening, how it's happening, and what I expect the reaction function to be following

on from this.

So the first thing is, let's put this in context.

And I did allude to this in the segment that I did earlier, where I basically said,

okay, look, you've got to consider the dollar system as a whole. And okay, so basically,

the quick version there is that after the Second World War, America ended up with all the gold because it was both a safe haven and a functional economy.

And it supplied Europe with much of the rest of the world, what it needed.

And they were paid in gold.

So you get to the end of the Second World War and the US has all the gold.

And somebody, probably an American, thought, wouldn't it be good if we got to hang on to all of this?

So you then have a whole series of agreements that I've explained at length in previous pro-economics.

The dollar system is a great one with the guests that I had on for that.

So go into that if you want to get all the details.

But that all sort of worked perfectly fine until US politicians could not stop spending more than they could justify,

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