Victoria Guida writes:

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff regime will completely transform America’s economic relationship with the rest of the world, all in the name of revitalizing domestic manufacturing.

And yet, many businesses won’t be rushing to shift their supply chains to U.S. shores.

For all the detail in Trump’s Wednesday announcement, his endgame is still shrouded in confusion. That’s lethal for long-term investment, making confident planning all but impossible.

“If you want stuff being put in the ground, you have to tell people the price, and the price needs to be fully inclusive of the tariff risk,” one former administration official in Trump’s first term, granted anonymity to speak freely, told me.

It’s not that tariffs can’t work as an action-forcing tool for companies to move production to the U.S. This is a wealthy country with one of the largest consumer markets in the world, and the president probably isn’t wrong that a lot of our trading partners would capitulate to keep serving it.

But I’ve asked multiple corporate executives in recent weeks whether companies are likely to start investing in manufacturing in the United States in response to Trump’s policies, and the message has basically been: That’s an unanswerable question right now. Because making those decisions requires understanding the relative costs of doing it versus not doing it, and Trump is far too unpredictable to allow for that kind of calculation.

If the markets bloodbath gets much worse, will Trump back off? How much will tariffs change over the next three-plus years? And tariff policy could change drastically under a new president in 2028. Might companies just wait it out rather than making a long-term commitment of resources and hoping for the best?

Can anyone answer these questions with real authority?

To be fair, the administration did lay out which tariff rates will apply to each country, so businesses and investors have much more context than they did earlier in the week. But still, no one seems completely sure of what happens next. So it’s worth asking if Trump really delivered clarity this week.

“Maybe, not sure, we will see?” Barry Ritholtz, co-founder and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, said when I emailed him to ask if this was the type of certainty markets were looking for out of Trump’s so-called Liberation Day. “A lot depends on how allies and trading partners respond — if it’s a trade/tariff tit for tat, this could get much uglier.”

And it’s already pretty ugly from a market perspective. According to a calculation from Omair Sharif, who is president of the firm Inflation Insights, the weighted average tariff rate is set to rise to somewhere around 25 to 30 percent. Last year, it was closer to 2 percent.

It’s hard to overstate how aggressive a change that is — and it’s a lot higher than what markets were expecting. Trump, always one for building walls, has now built one out of tariffs. [Continue reading…]