[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Damien

Probably the best we could hope for.

BTW It seems a lot of those 'what they charge us' figures are nonsense.

Here's the formula.

Here’s what the White House and its crack team of trade investigators seems to have done: Take the US’s goods trade deficit with any particular country, and divide it by the total amount of goods imported from that country. Cut that percentage in half, and there’s the US’s “reciprocal” tariff rate.

We can confirm this fits* the numbers for the first 24 countries listed, which we checked by hand because we could hardly believe it and also because we refuse to use AI for anything. Kudos to @orthonormalist and James Surowiecki, who both put it together, more or less.

Let’s look at Bangladesh as an example. The US imported $8.4bn of goods from Bangladesh in 2024, giving it a $6.2bn trade deficit with the country. 6.2 divided by 8.4 is 0.738.

And what do you know? The White House says that the country has “charged” 74 per cent “tariffs” against the US, “including currency manipulation and trade barriers”.

https://www.ft.com/content/e025d7e6-...5-7900b94ac153