'Trade hack' could upend global economy, expert warns

US tariffs are not traditional trade mechanisms designed to produce economic solutions, but a deliberate "hack" of the global trading system driven by a grievance-based narrative, an economics professor argues in a new book.

Richard Baldwin, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington and a professor at IMD Business School in Switzerland, said the tariffs act as a "political placebo "for domestic audiences rather than address structural economic issues.

"If you think about it as a trade policy to fix economic problems, it's incoherent; but as a policy to address grievances, it's perfectly coherent," Baldwin said at a recent event hosted by the Peterson Institute in Washington.