Will Donald Trump's trade war tip the economy into a recession?
It seems a reasonable question to ask. The White House has initiated a rapidly escalating global tit-for-tat, with thousands of products from the United States, China, Canada, Mexico, and Europe now affected or threatened by tariffs. The price of imported goods is increasing. The demand for exported goods is falling. American businesses are laying workers off, and some are warning that they might end up bankrupt.
In some sense, Trump could not have picked a better time to engage the country in a pointless, destructive round of mercantilism: The country's pace of growth is so strong that the tariffs should have only a muted effect on headline GDP and jobs numbers, economists think. Still, certain industries and certain places stand to suffer considerably—and this growth-chilling trade war might be hard to call off in the event that the economy were to slow down.
