Professor of Economics disses Trump’s trade deal with the UK: “They account for 3% of American trade”

A month on from his ‘Liberation Day’ announcement, on Thursday President Donald Trump revealed that his administration was close to signing a trade deal with the United Kingdom.

Trump had promised that a raft of beneficial deals would come as a result of his tariff policy. However few countries had appeared willing to buckle to the economic pressure. Thursday’s announcement was billed as a major milestone by the Trump administration but some experts have doubted whether it will have any noticeable impact on the US economy.

Economist Justin Wolfers is a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a professor of economic and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. In a conversation on CNN, Wolfers was asked whether he considers the US-UK agreement a “major trade deal” for the White House:

“No,” Wolfers replied. “They are our 11th-largest trading partner. They count for 3% of American trade... That leaves 97% of US trade up in the air.”

He continued: “Go back six weeks ago. The average tariff that the United Kingdom charged countries around the world was 1%. That’s the stakes here. So the best we can do is knock the UK down from 1% to zero. And it’s already clear that we didn’t get zero.”

At Thursday’s event Trump made an effort to talk up the deal, despite failing to detail exactly how the new agreement will be structured. It’s thought that the deal is fairly limited in its scope and will leave in place the 10% tariffs that Trump has imposed in nearly all goods entering the US.

“The President is a showman he’s going to tell you that’s there’s all sorts of wonderful things about it,” Wolfer explained. “But [the UK is] not remotely central to us.”

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