In less than three weeks, President Donald Trump has issued four sweeping tariff threats that, in normal times, would rattle investors, unnerve CEOs, and send economists rushing to revise their growth forecasts for the targeted countries. Instead, financial markets and C-suite executives have mostly shrugged off Trump's latest warnings involving Iran's trading partners, Greenland's supporters, Canada, and South Korea, seeing them as merely words intended to gain leverage or change behavior—nothing he'd actually carry out.
According to a new Bloomberg Economics analysis, it's not quite that Trump always chickens out. More precisely, Bloomberg found, he follows through only about a quarter of the time. About 43 percent of threats were withdrawn—sometimes with a perceived win declared by Trump—or haven't been imposed yet.
Nicole Gorton-Caratelli and Chris Kennedy of Bloomberg Economics reviewed 49 tariff threats he made or new trade investigations his administration initiated from his November 2024 election to Sunday (the tally doesn't include his newest target—South Korea). Fewer than half of the threats have been fully implemented, Bloomberg found.
Here's a breakdown of how his threats have played out:
Looking at a timeline of the 49 announcements, most of those that were fully implemented or put under investigation came between February and September.
The monthly breakdown also shows Trump's threats petered out toward the end of last year as affordability concerns hurt his standing in public opinion polls.
"The pattern isn't perfect," Gorton-Caratelli and Kennedy wrote in their research note. "In general, though, we've seen Trump walk back his most attention-grabbing threats, which tend to be those that would drastically increase the U.S. effective tariff rate or threaten the trade truce with China."
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