1/Clearly, neither the FED, nor many US economy observers took the impacts of the tariffs, seriously enough. Tariffs are an extremely effective method to damage not just your own economy, but your trading partner's as well. Ricardo laid it all out.
2/ Historically, if you moved your economy from autarky to free trade, those who did the same and traded with you not only benefited through specialization, but, through the expansion of existing markets to their fuller potential. Trump three this into reverse. It's an Own Goal.
3/ As @paulkrugman has elegantly pointed out, most people who *think* they understand Ricardo really don't. They get the "I make a thing better than you make that thing" part, but they don't get the secret sauce: a much bigger market in that thing all around, and wage expansion.
4/ In autarky, for example, both Japan and the US are determined to make a closed market in bicycles, even though US steel frames are better and cheaper and Japanese components are better and cheaper. The solution is obvious: let Japan consumers pair an American frame to their...
5/...own excellent components and let American consumers pair those Japanese components to the US frame. This is about as far as most people go in understanding Ricardo. Ah-hah, yes, the two strengths! But, now comes the secret sauce, and it tells you why tariffs are so damaging:
6/ What happens in the US-Japanese bicycle example is the size of the bike market *expands to its fuller potential in both countries*. This expansion flows from the optimal combo of a great frame and great components at a lower price. Boom: labor demand rises in *both* countries.
7/ This is why just the introduction of tariffs is so damaging. Tariffs aren't just a shockwave to products and inputs to products. Tariff effects flow immediately to labor demand, affecting either wages or future hiring plans. Run the dumb experiment long enough: you get damage.
8/ Now recently Steve Bannon was on Bill Maher and he claimed the wonderful thing about Trump trade policy is that it would elegantly redirect supply chains to the benefit of the US. This is both bullshit, and a fantasy. The only elegance is in its beautifully naive incompetence.
9/ If the UK does a hard Brexit, we'll all get a real-time lesson in how global supply chains, built over a half-century, will not in fact be reorganized over night, nor over two years or five years. Instead, you'll just get a demand collapse and all the joys of a deep recession.
10/ The self-harm in the urge to pull away from free trade, and the morbid fascination with autarky, is not just limited to products. The urge affects intellectual capital as well.
11/ Part of being a competent citizen, a constructive rather than a destructive citizen, is cultivating respect for the humans who came before you; who struggled pretty hard to understand how the world works. David Ricardo is one of those people. Put yourself in his shoes...
12/...and try to imagine how hard it was to discover and then explain a critical and new dynamic to free trade the world didn't understand in his time. Indeed, the world was trapped in an ongoing error about trade. Plodding, ignorant, unduly harming itself. Every fucking day.
13/ You owe it to yourself and to Ricardo to understand his idea. Let's take this thread out with the masterful explanation of Ricardo by @paulkrugman. Read it. Absorb it. And for god sakes, make sure you understand it before you foolishly try to fight it. web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ri…
14/ Coda: Here's a beautiful Breadwinner frame made here in Portland, married to the amazing Shimano Ultegra groupset made in Japan. The global bike market is growing strong, putting fresh wages (and fresh buying power) into the pockets of workers. 
