The GOAT Of All USWAGs

We needs start with a confession. After Treasury Secretary Bessent promised a “single number” Reciprocal Tariff for each nation on the planet a few weeks ago, we erroneously imagined the mind numbing task of quantifying 230 countries’ NTBs, currency manipulations, tax regime distortions, fiscal subsidies and regulatory favoritism for domestic companies. And then weighting each of these factors for their alleged contribution to the US bilateral trade imbalance with the country in question—in order to compile all of its trade malefactions and reduce them to a single Reciprocal Tariff number.

Alas, what we got at 4PM Wednesday afternoon, instead, was a scratch pad of third grader long-division, whereupon some intern at the White House was handed a HP 12c and told to divide the US trade deficit with each country by that country’s imports to the US and then divide that answer by 2. After that, the procedure apparently was to scribble the math result on the white board that the Donald proudly held up at yesterday’s presser for all the world to see—even as anyone with a modicum of knowledge about trade and/or economics recoiled in disbelief, if not horror.