If you read my op-ed The Tariff Gambit, you already know I called out the so-called “reciprocal tariff” math as spreadsheet nationalism — blunt, lazy, and dangerous. Turns out, I was being generous.
This week on CNN’s OutFront, host Erin Burnett interviewed economist Brant Neiman — a former Treasury official under Biden whose research the Trump White House (via Peter Navarro) supposedly used to justify their global tariff rollout. Neiman’s reaction? Shock.
“This was a terrible policy… a cascade of mistakes.”
Navarro and Trump took Neiman’s narrow, academic model — one designed to analyze specific product categories in bilateral trade — and applied it universally across every trading partner. Then they got the math wrong on top of that. Trump claimed a 46% tariff on Japan was justified based on Neiman’s formula. The actual number? Closer to 12%. If you follow Trump’s own “cut it in half” logic, that would’ve made it 6%.
Neiman doesn’t even know where they got the 0.25 number they plugged in:
“My research would have used 0.95… the number they used made the tariff nearly four times higher.”
This wasn’t policy. It was improvisation disguised as analysis.
This wasn’t strategy. It was malpractice with a podium.
As Neiman noted:
“Markets are moving tremendously… this is an unbelievably consequential policy… and the methodology was two pages long.”
If you read my op-ed The Tariff Gambit, you already know I called out the so-called “reciprocal tariff” math as spreadsheet nationalism — blunt, lazy, and dangerous. Turns out, I was being generous.
This week on CNN’s OutFront, host Erin Burnett interviewed economist Brant Neiman — a former Treasury official under Biden whose research the Trump White House (via Peter Navarro) supposedly used to justify their global tariff rollout. Neiman’s reaction? Shock.
“This was a terrible policy… a cascade of mistakes.”
Navarro and Trump took Neiman’s narrow, academic model — one designed to analyze specific product categories in bilateral trade — and applied it universally across every trading partner. Then they got the math wrong on top of that. Trump claimed a 46% tariff on Japan was justified based on Neiman’s formula. The actual number? Closer to 12%. If you follow Trump’s own “cut it in half” logic, that would’ve made it 6%.
Neiman doesn’t even know where they got the 0.25 number they plugged in:
“My research would have used 0.95… the number they used made the tariff nearly four times higher.”
This wasn’t policy. It was improvisation disguised as analysis.
This wasn’t strategy. It was malpractice with a podium.
As Neiman noted:
“Markets are moving tremendously… this is an unbelievably consequential policy… and the methodology was two pages long.”
Two pages long.
To justify tariffs that could trigger trade wars
A cascade of incompetence matched only by the malevolence and economic ignorance sums up this White House.