Trump tariffs may imperil global economic rebound

last year, even as lawmakers expressed openness to the idea after nearly 60 people were gunned down in Las Vegas.

FLORIDA

“I think when you start getting into some of the blanket restrictions on people’s Second Amendment rights, I think that that is constitutionally vulnerable. … I mean think about it, you have an enumerated right in the Bill of Rights, there’s really no precedent to just do a blanket ban on certain adults,” DeSantis said on the show.

Grieving families and student survivors from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where a shooter killed 17 people last month, worked feverishly in recent weeks to lobby a gun-friendly, Republican-run state government. The new law fell short of achieving a ban on assault-style weapons, but it creates a so-called guardian program enabling some teachers and other school employees to carry guns.

Five legislators seeking statewide office voted against it, as did the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. GOP Attorney General Pam Bondi praised it, but other statewide candidates in the Legislature voted against it.

Things had been going along so nicely.

Over the past year, the major regions of the world finally shed the scars of a global financial crisis and grew in unison for the first time in a decade. Worldwide growth is expected to hit 3.9 percent this year, the best pace since 2011, and the International Monetary Fund says most countries are sharing in the prosperity.

But President Donald Trump’s announcement Thursday that the United States would impose heavy tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, with some countries potentially exempted, suddenly raised a fear that few had anticipated: That U.S. tariffs could trigger a chain of tit-for-tat retaliation by America’s trading partners that could erupt into a full-blown trade war and possibly threaten the global economy.

Given how far many countries have come since the painful years of debt crises and a crushing recession, the threat posed by the tariffs struck many as an ill-considered risk.

“Tariffs threaten to strangle the global golden goose,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The global economy is on the same page for the first time in over a decade. This threatens to derail it.”