Dreams of a quick calming of the storm after the US’s tariff announcement on April 2 seem unlikely to come true. Most of the new tariffs US president, Donald Trump, announced on April 2 came into effect on April 5. Trading partners in many parts of the world have now announced counter-measures. By Leatherbiz.

Stock markets everywhere are registering large falls, a situation that the Financial Times described on April 7 as a deepening “global rout”. In another article, it said the markets were reacting to “an aggressive push to roll back globalisation”. Mr Trump, it said, seems intent on unwinding decades of economic integration, with the risk of a 1930s-style global trade war now causing the markets to panic.

The FT’s chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, has said the US’s imposition of a new baseline tariff of 10% on almost all imports, with much steeper rates for many key supplier countries, had “injected massive uncertainty into the world economy”. He pointed out that this made it difficult for companies to plan and make long-term decisions.

Speaking on BBC radio, Mr Wolf said: “We don’t know where Donald Trump’s policies are going to go. My guess is that, at the end of this, tariffs will remain much higher than they have been for close to 100 years.”

The author of an influential 2004 book called Why globalisation works, Martin Wolf said he fears the effects of what President Trump called Liberation Day will be long-lasting. He said, too, that it is trade in physical goods, which, naturally, include hides, skins, leather and finished products made from leather, that will bear the brunt of the turmoil.

“Crucially, tariffs only affect goods,” he told the BBC. “They don’t have much effect on services. It is very difficult for me to imagine that [the impact of Liberation Day] is going to be temporary. That means the disintegration of the goods part of our economies.”

He explained that this disintegration had already begun, at the time of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and added that this new crisis was likely to accelerate the decline.

He argued that globalisation, with a huge proportion of manufacturing activity moving from the most developed economies to other parts of the world, has been “unambiguously good”, especially for developing countries in Asia. He said that, thanks to globalisation, extreme poverty in most of those countries had been “more or less eliminated”.

With the US receiving only 14% of the world’s imports, Mr Wolf also suggested that one outcome might be that the rest of the world continues to keep globalisation in place and perhaps even to use it in a better way than before.

It will probably be some time before we know if this can become reality.