Kamikaze' Could this be the end of globalisation?

At the beginning of this helter-skelter week in Trumpland, Downing Street was declaring globalisation not only dead, but a failure.

- Patrick Wintour

Now, only five trading days later, the autopsy is still under way, but the victim may instead be economic populism, strangled by Wall Street, the citadel of globalisation. Donald Trump's "liberation day" may have been the anti-globalist's entombment day.

In an effort to deny even a tactical retreat, Trump's aides insist the White House goal all along was not to weaken globalism, or even to protect the US economy with tariffs, but instead to get into a negotiation to lower tariffs round the world and to punish China.

As cover stories go, it is hardly credible, partly because the tariffs were repeatedly lauded by Trump as a macro-economic revenue-raising measure, or a means to boost US manufacturing.

The reality is that, faced with an attempt to remake the world trading system overnight, or what the former UK Treasury minister Jim O'Neill described as "a full-on kamikaze mission", the markets revolted. But the retreat caused by the sell-off of US Treasury bonds has only been in part, with tariffs set at 10% universally, except for parts of trade with Mexico and Canada.

Washington's trade war with China still leaves tariffs at an overall effective average rate of 27% for US consumers - the highest since 1903, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

The rate falls to 18.5% after imports fall in response to tariffs, including a fall in China's share of US imports from 14% to 4%.

Amid the chaos, significant long-term damage has been done not only to Trump's political credibility, but also to the resilience of globalisation as a system.

Trust, agreed rules and a degree of political stability are the underpinnings of globalisation.