Trump’s Tariff Critics: Wrong Before

But their mistakes? Apparently disregarded

As President Donald Trump rolls out sweeping tariffs in 2025—slapping a 10% baseline on all imports, 54% on Chinese goods, and targeted rates as high as 49% on nations like Cambodia—critics are sounding the alarm. Economists, former public officials, and commentators warn of inflation spikes, a U.S. recession, and global trade wars. Some are estimating a $3,800 hit to the average household this year, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

Many in media are quick to report the doom and gloom predictions about the Trump policy as if they are undeniable truth.

But upon examination, it turns out that many of the voices now decrying Trump’s economic policies, or their institutions, have a history of flawed predictions. In fact, some of them have backed the very policies that arguably helped dig the hole America is in today—ballooning debt, deficits, and trade imbalances.

There are always differing views as to the outcome various economic policies will have and nobody can tell the future with certainty— that’s why there’s constant debate. It would be unrealistic to expect perfection among economic predictions. But too often, the media tout negative assessments of Trump’s tariffs as if they are indisputable fact, as if the critics of Trump couldn’t possibly be mistaken.

Yet they have been.

Read on for details.

Take Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, who has been vocal against Trump’s tariffs. “Virtually all economists think that the impact of the tariffs will be very bad for America and for the world. They will almost surely be inflationary,” Stiglitz told the Century Foundation on January 31. He warned that central banks might raise interest rates, risking “stagflation” in a weak economy.

Yet Stiglitz was among those who made a bad call on inflation risks under Biden. In 2021, he supported the Biden administration view that inflation—peaking at 9.1% in 2022—was “transitory” or short-term, tied to supply chain hiccups, as noted in his writings for Project Syndicate that year.

You may recall that Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen first tried to alleviate inflation fears by stating that the recent inflation increases, around 3% year-over-year at the time, were due to "transitory factors" and not indicative of a long-term trend. President Biden echoed the sentiment in a White House speech on July 19, 2021, stating, "Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we've seen are — were expected and expected to be temporary.” However, inflation soared to 9.1% by June 2022, leading Yellen to later confess in a March 2024 Fox Business interview, “I regret saying it was transitory.”

By 2023, Stiglitz also admitted (in a Bloomberg interview) that the inflation persistence was “unexpected.”

Another example is Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister. He slammed Trump’s tariffs as a betrayal of global economic cooperation. “The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday,” Carney said Friday, when announcing countermeasures.

But Carney, a former Bank of England governor, helped steer Canada into a $1.9 trillion debt by 2025—20% of GDP—partly through Covid-era spending, per Statistics Canada. His policies, while viewed as stabilizing in the short-term, deepened Canada’s trade reliance on the U.S., with 75% of exports heading south. That left Canada vulnerable to Trump’s 25% auto tariffs, according to the Anderson Economic Group.

Carney’s fiscal choices arguably exacerbated the very imbalances Trump is now targeting.

Economists at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) have been equally critical but equally flawed in past analyses.

Marcus Noland, PIIE’s executive vice president, said on January 31, that Trump’s tariffs “will have the effect of depressing U.S. economic growth, contributing to a higher rate of inflation,” as quoted by the Century Foundation. Last year, PIIE researchers Kimberly Clausing and Mary Lovely reportedly estimated a $2,600 annual hit per household from Trump’s proposed 60% China tariff and 20% universal tariff.

They also have spotty records on their economic predictions.

Clausing and Lovely joined the crowd wrongly calling inflation “transitory” in 2021. Clausing, then at UCLA predicted there would be a quick return to 2%. Actually, inflation was on its way to a peak above 9%. Lovely and Clausing later acknowledged their errors. Clausing said in a 2023 podcast that “we didn’t anticipate the duration of supply chain issues.”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has also provided a wealth of prominent critics and criticism of Trump’s tariffs—after the agency has been sorely wrong on past economic predictions.

On Friday, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva stated that Trump’s tariffs “clearly represent a significant risk to the global outlook at a time of sluggish growth.” IMF Chief Economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas warned on January 17 that a new wave of tariffs could “exacerbate trade tensions, lower investment, reduce market efficiency, distort trade flows, and again disrupt supply chains” and have global repercussions. And IMF First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath on October 23, 2024, predicted that a broad-based trade war could lead to a 7% loss in global GDP—equivalent to the combined economies of France and Germany.

However, it was the IMF that backed massive stimulus during Covid, lending $650 billion in Special Drawing Rights by 2021, per IMF records. That contributed to the “record debt” that Reuters cites as a drag on today’s economy.

Going back to 2007, the IMF projected 4.9% global growth for 2008. That was a big miss regarding the severity of the impending financial crisis. During the Eurozone debt crisis that began in 2010, the IMF overestimated growth and underestimated austerity’s impact. The IMF also wrongly predicted global inflation was temporary in 2021 at 3.5%. But it hit 8.7% in 2022.

And the IMF has consistently underestimated UK growth issuing 15 incorrect forecasts since 2016.

Add the Media to the List

Some media outlets that supported the Biden administration’s “inflation is transitory” narrative in 2021 have shifted to criticizing President Trump’s 2025 tariffs, often warning of inflationary risks despite their earlier downplaying of inflation concerns.

On March 9, The Washington Post was highlighting economic turbulence from Trump’s tariffs, noting consumer discontent and a potential recession. That’s a stark contrast to its earlier minimization of inflationary pressures. In 2020, Washington Post staff writer Dino Grandoni dismissed fears of gas price spikes under Biden as a political attack “fueled by Trump himself.” He also incorrectly suggested that any inflation under Biden would be “marginal, at best,” as reported on June 15, 2022.

On March 12, CNN warned Trump’s tariffs were straining consumers alongside inflation and a stock market plunge, citing a 3% inflation rate and retailer struggles—a shift from their earlier assurances under Biden. In 2021, CNN echoed the Biden administration’s inflation line, with reports framing inflation as a global issue tied to supply chains and the Ukraine war, often repeating the “transitory” talking point.

MSNBC is also critical of Trump’s tariffs, with coverage implying the policy could exacerbate economic woes, despite its prior dismissal of inflation as a temporary issue. In 2021, MSNBC backed the “transitory” narrative, aligning with Biden’s team by attributing inflation to external factors like the pandemic and corporate greed.

Not all Trump tariff critics were wrong on Biden era inflation.

Ken Rogoff, former IMF chief economist, is warning that Trump’s tariffs raise the odds of a recession. And Rogoff got inflation right in 2021, predicting in a Project Syndicate piece that stimulus would overheat the economy. That was a call ignored by mainstream media favoring “transitory” voices like Stiglitz and Clausing.

Still, Rogoff’s broader record includes supporting free trade policies in the 1990s that widened the U.S. trade deficit partly due to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which he endorsed.

The point is there’s no way to know for sure who’s right. But many of the tariff skeptics given prominence in today’s news are some of the same figures and groups that helped shape the debt-laden, trade-imbalanced world Trump aims to fix.

Their past errors, from inflation misreads to debt-fueled policies, cast a shadow over their current dire predictions. As Trump’s tariffs unfold, the question isn’t just whether they’ll tank the economy—it’s why some in media are giving so much credence in critics crying “doom” after getting so much wrong before.

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