GLOBALIZATION

New Economy Short Cut: From Smoot-Hawley to Trump?

In this Short Cut, we talked with Kirsten Wandschneider and Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich about what we can learn from the 1930s about trade wars.

PUBLISHED

3. JUNE 2025
(c) Birmingham Museums Trust

A look at history shows that aggressive tariff policies can have devastating consequences. In the 1930s, a number of governments reacted to the US Smoot-Hawley tariffs with drastic countermeasures. Global trade collapsed – and the global economic crisis worsened dramatically.

Does Donald Trump’s aggressive course threaten a similar catastrophe today? What lessons can be learned from history?

We explored this in our New Economy Short Cut From Smoot-Hawley to Trump? What we can learn about trade wars from the 1930s with Kirsten Wandschneider, University of Vienna and Kiel Institute Fellow, and Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, historian, on June 04, 2025 at 14:00 CEST via Zoom.

Click here for the ReLive.

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After three decades of poorly managed integration, globalization is threatened by social discontent and the rise of populist forces. A new paradigm will need better ways not only to compensate the groups that have lost, but to distribute the gains more broadly from the start.

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