Navigating “Trumponomics”
Published 15 July 2025
“Tariffs are here to stay; that’s the only certainty amid rising uncertainty,” says Trinh Nguyen, Senior Economist, Emerging Asia at Natixis.
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President Trump’s trade policies are unpredictable, but tariffs are the one constant. He employs country-specific, broad reciprocal, and soon sectoral tariffs (e.g., on pharmaceuticals, timber, shipbuilding) as tools to achieve his economic goals. Trump’s tariff strategy only needs to be “slightly successful” to meet his overall economic aims. Like Xi Jinping, Trump prioritizes the physical, industrial economy (e.g., steel, rare earths) over the financial sector that dominates the US economy today. Supply chains are consolidating regionally through nearshoring and onshoring, leading to shorter, more localized production networks rather than truly global supply chains.
About the NPF International Trade Fellowship 2025
The National Press Foundation holds an annual International Trade Fellowship workshop for journalists, sponsored by the Hinrich Foundation. This year, the Foundations welcomed 25 Asia-based journalists at the Hinrich Foundation’s office in Singapore. The sessions, held in June, focused on a range of themes including global trade policy, the age of data, the macroeconomic outlook, climate change, Asia’s place in a fast-changing world order and more.
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