WTO chief warns against ‘catastrophic’ tit-for-tat tariffs

She recalled the fallout from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the United States during the Great Depression in 1930, which prompted retaliation and worsened the global economic crisis at the time.

“We are very much saying to our members at the WTO: you have other avenues. Even if a tariff is levied, please keep calm, don’t wake up and without the necessary groundwork levy your own,” she said.

“If we have tit-for-tat retaliation, whether it’s 25 percent tariffs, 60 percent, and we go to where we were in the 1930s, we are going to see double-digit global GDP losses, double-digit. That’s catastrophic.”