Richard Baldwin

No.

So Richard Baldwin, friend of the show, he argued recently on...

You can check out his posts on LinkedIn and elsewhere on his website, that the US has been quietly retreating from the tariff escalation that began in 2025, although the headlines would suggest otherwise.

The effective average tariff, according to him, paid on US imports rose from roughly 2% at the start of the Trump administration to a peak of 11 in 2025, in October 2025, but it fell to around 6.7% in May of this year.

Resilience increasingly looks less like a fortress and more like a portfolio.

Work by IMD economist Richard Baldwin and co-authors on supply chain resilience helps illuminate the trade-off.

Redundancy can buy protection, but rarely for free.

A second supplier may reduce dependence on the first while raising costs, More inventory can ensure against disruption while tying up capital.

All those old epitaphs of global cooperation, globalization, all of that seem to be becoming cute little words that we used to use hundreds of years ago.

And everybody now seems to be doing this entire... sour in plus something sour in this sour in that which puts a giant question mark on the very growth models itself manufacturing historically has been one sure shot way of creating mass prosperity for the middle classes because making things by hand used to employ a lot of people but that model if you depending on who you ask Like, for example, I follow the work of Richard Baldwin recently, the Harvard professor, I keep forgetting his name.

He also was a big proponent of manufacturing-led growth.

Now, all of them have switched to this tune saying that manufacturing-led growth model as a way for prosperity for a lot of these low and middle income countries is permanently closed.