Tariffs: Making Sense of the Chaos (June 5)

Confused by the tariffs? Most people are! Together, let’s discuss the arguments for and against tariffs: the issue of trade deficits, reshoring jobs to the US, tariffs as a revenue generator, and remaking the world trading system. We will go through these rationales for tariffs and bring standard economic reasoning to bear on their accuracy. We will discuss both economic theory and empirical work to try to understand how much tariffs will solve the problems that are cited.

Dennis Sheehan, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of finance at the Penn State University Smeal College of Business. He previously taught in the business schools at Purdue University, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Georgetown University and received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. Dennis is happily retired in his hometown of Newport.