Liberation Day for Trump as he 'drops nuclear bomb on the global trading system'

US president unleashes a blitz of tariffs - but the UK gets off relatively lightly

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The biggest global trade war since the 1930s exploded this week and as a weary Downing Street was forced to concede, no one is immune from its fallout. Donald Trump's so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs designed to usher in a golden era of US manufacturing and economic growth were greeted with undisguised glee by the hardcore Maga ultras.

One particularly overexcited super-Trumpite, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, even went as far as to suggest that April 2 should become a new US national holiday "to honour the jobs, skills and trade that returned to America and her workers".

For the rest of us there can be no celebration, even if a post-Brexit Britain escaped the far harsher tariffs levied on the European Union.

But even in a best-case scenario the new era of a minimum 10 per cent trade barrier into the world's biggest national market will slow global economic growth and throw up yet another administrative friction nightmare for exporters. In a worst-case scenario it could plunge the world economy into a new deep freeze.

Even James Bond is not immune. The maker of 007's trademark sports car of choice, Aston Martin, this week downgraded its sales forecast on the back of the 25 per cent tariffs on all imports of non-US made vehicles to America.

Not surprisingly, stock markets around the world, even in the US, the country that is supposed to benefit from all this, reacted with dismay with the S&P future contract pointing to a fall of around 2.5 per cent when markets open in New York later today. But just how bad will Trump's bull in a china shop tariff turmoil be for the UK? After all, the US is Britain's biggest single national export market with machinery, transport equipment and chemicals among the largest industry categories.