Emmanuel Moulin put it with the calm of someone who translates data into certainty. The new American tariffs generate uncertainty and prove unfavorable for growth. The Governor of the Bank of France wasn't sounding an alarm about catastrophe. He was simply reporting what his institution measures on a continuous basis.

On July 24, 2026, the United States replaced its temporary ten percent global tariff with a structure ranging from ten to twelve point five percent on goods from sixty trading partners. Among them: the European Union and China. The official justification invoked lax enforcement of forced labor prohibitions.

A tariff is a restriction on trade, because it adds an artificial cost to goods that once crossed borders more freely: this is the reading that dominates financial conversations. Tariffs impose friction, friction reduces growth, and that's why the GDP impact gets calculated. The equation holds. But it remains incomplete.

The United States is acting unilaterally. It invokes a moral cause that's difficult to publicly rebut and deploys instruments affecting dozens of countries simultaneously. Moulin gets one technical point right: thanks to the Turnberry trade agreement, signed in 2025, the European Union remains relatively protected. This isn't optimism. It's a direct reading of a legal text that China doesn't possess.

This official version fits a familiar pattern. The United States has used tariffs as geopolitical leverage for years. The rhetoric around labor rights has documented support in certain industries. Central banks have built reasonable models to estimate trade shocks on inflation and growth. When Moulin mentions uncertainty, he cites concrete variables: business confidence surveys, investment decisions being postponed.

Why does the official justification almost never align with the countries receiving the highest tariff? If the logic were purely humanitarian, we'd expect it to hit hardest where records are worst. The tiered distribution across sixty partners suggests something closer to a general negotiating instrument than a precise sanction for verified behavior.

None of this questions Moulin's role. As a central banker, he measures the aggregate effect without wading into the politics behind the cause. Still, when media outlets repeat the phrase "forced labor," they're accepting the narrative Washington has proposed. That narrative serves an additional function: it shifts the conversation away from why the United States is unilaterally restructuring global trade, and toward which countries are failing their workers.

A twelve point five percent tariff on Philippine textiles or Vietnamese components isn't paid by the issuing government. It ends up being paid by entire supply chains: factories that cut labor costs, distributors who raise consumer prices, workers who rarely show up in quarterly reports.

Something similar happens when universal basic income is discussed in relation to technological displacement. The same instrument takes on radically different meanings depending on who designs it and who suffers it. The European Union experiences this as a manageable diplomatic annoyance thanks to Turnberry. China feels it as structural pressure on its export model. The remaining emerging economies simply absorb the blow without having participated in any prior discussion.

What does this mean for someone who doesn't run a central bank or negotiate treaties? The uncertainty Moulin speaks of isn't distributed equitably. Some countries turn it into a technical problem thanks to solid institutional frameworks. Others receive it as a direct shock to domestic employment and prices.

Stones don't lie. In the 1930s, the Smoot-Hawley Act raised tariffs under the argument of protecting domestic jobs. Douglas Irwin documented how that measure triggered a spiral of retaliation that worsened the global contraction. Today's institutions are different: the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization exist and should, in theory, cushion escalations. Yet the basic process repeats itself.

What's missing from the dominant analysis is an examination of who benefits from the narrative, beyond who benefits commercially. The administration gains a moral justification that's hard to criticize. The European Union reinforces the legitimacy of its diplomacy. Analysts trained in GDP percentage points have few tools to observe how the real cost gets distributed among the sixty partners who never had a Turnberry of their own.

I don't have full clarity on how this structural asymmetry gets resolved without a multilateral framework with real enforcement capacity. It's a subject I'm still exploring, one that connects to ideas I develop in Las Piedras No Mienten, a book still in preparation that examines the patterns that emerge when power decides unilaterally and calls that decision order.

One concrete fact contradicts the reassuring reading of this episode: the expired temporary ten percent tariff wasn't lower than the average of the new structure. For a good portion of the sixty affected partners, this represents, in practice, a net increase disguised as a technical adjustment. The uncertainty already existed. Only the name we gave it changed.

What kind of global order gets consolidated when unilateral measures are presented as moral defense while deepening divisions that economic aggregates fail to capture?

Sources:

1. Public statements by Emmanuel Moulin, Governor of the Bank of France, July 2026.

2. Turnberry trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, 2025.

3. Irwin, Douglas. Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression. Princeton University Press, 2011.

4. World Trade Organization, reports on U.S. tariff policy, 2026.