The World Bank came out with its updated projections for economic growth for 2025. They showed slower growth for pretty much the whole world. The main factor in the slowing is the tariffs that the Trump administration has imposed on most of our trading partners, as well as their retaliation.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the United States had the sharpest slowing with its growth for 2025 now projected at just 1.4 percent. This should perhaps be expected given that growth was actually a small negative in the first quarter of this year. Just to remind people: The economy grew 2.8 percent last year and was almost universally projected to grow at a comparable rate in 2025. This slowdown in growth really should be considered as Trump’s handiwork.

The other noteworthy item in these projections is that China’s growth is still projected to be 4.5 percent, the same as the World Bank’s prior projection. This means that, at least according to the World Bank, Trump’s tariffs have not done major harm to China’s economy.

Trump’s tariffs may end up being one of the biggest self-owns of the century. There are reasonable arguments for trying to rebuild US manufacturing in some sectors, as Biden had done with the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act. However, across-the board tariffs based only on the size of the US bilateral trade deficit with a country do not make any sense, and it looks like the United States is paying a serious price for ill-considered trade policy.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post China Now Projected to Grow Three Times as Fast as the United States appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.