Does the recent tariff rhetoric suggest that we're entering a global trade war?

And what could that mean for economies and markets?

I'm Alison Nathan and this is Goldman Sachs Exchanges.

Today I'm joined by Kamakshia Trevetti, our head of global foreign exchange, interest rates and emerging markets strategy research.

Alec Phillips, our chief political economist, and Joseph Briggs, who co-leads the global economics team within Goldman Sachs research.

Joseph and Alec are here with me in New York and Kamakshia is in London. So, Alec, as we sit here on

Wednesday morning, we have seen an absolute slew of tariff announcements over the past week.

They just keep coming. It's been very hard to keep track of. As we sit here today, we are

waiting for more details

on what could be a reciprocal tariff, and those details might actually be out by the time

this podcast sees a light of day. I think it would be useful just to start with catch us up.

What is happening with tariffs at this point?

Right. So a lot has happened and a lot more has been announced that hasn't yet happened. Starting with inauguration day, I think as we went into inauguration day, a lot of our clients had an expectation that you were going to have a bunch of big tariff announcements. Instead, on inauguration day, we got a memo that had all sorts of recommendations and studies and reports due by April 1st.

And what that seemed to suggest is that actually we're going to get a reprieve for a couple of months

where maybe we wouldn't have some of those big announcements. And then, of course, actually,

that day, President Trump said, but by the way, Mexico and Canada tariffs starting February 1st.

So all of a sudden, that April 1st date looked a little less relevant.

He also then proposed the 10% on China, which he seemed to shy away from the first day, but then the second day of the new administration said, no, yes, we're going

to do China 10% on February 1st as well. We get to February 1st. Obviously, we saw what happened.

He proposed the tariff formally on all three countries. And then, of course, we got the deal.

And for Canada and Mexico, those tariffs were pushed off by a month to March 4th. For China,

they were

...