Donald Trump trashed global economic orthodoxy. A year on, did he leave Australia a winner or loser? | Australian economy

One year into Donald Trump’s presidency and experts in Australia and around the world can hear the grinding of history’s gears.

“We have entered a new economic era; one with rules that are very different to the past,” the Commonwealth Bank’s chief economist, Luke Yeaman, wrote in October.

We exit the heyday of globalisation and its relentless, single-minded pursuit of efficiency, to … what?

At this point it looks like a world of rising trade protectionism, populism, self-sufficiency, suspicion, conflict and crackdowns on the movement of people and capital.

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Trump has exploded so many established norms that his return to the White House seems to have ruled a line between what was before, and what is now and will be.

The “liberation day” tariffs in April last year triggered fears of a global trade war that would smash the world economy.

As US import taxes returned to levels not seen in a century, the Reserve Bank board in May was so worried about the fallout that it considered the case for a supersized double rate cut.

“It’s been a complete rollercoaster,” the RBA governor, Michele Bullock, lamented at the time.

Experts predicted the collateral damage to the Australian economy from rising protectionism could reach $27bn, or 1% of GDP.

Nearly 60% of economists surveyed by the Economic Society of Australia expected the Trump presidency to hurt Australian economic growth, versus 8% – just three of the 39 experts – who reckoned the opposite.

Australia an unlikely winner

So much for the rhetoric, what about the reality? A fair summary would be: so far, so good.

The global economy has not fallen into a hole. Countries have adjusted to American trade aggression and exporters have found other markets or workarounds, at least temporarily.

Yeaman, a former Treasury deputy secretary before his role at the CBA, says he had not been expecting the worst.

Still, he says, “it is a bit of a puzzle: why hasn’t the world been hit harder by tariffs?”

In theory, a medium-sized and open economy like Australia’s stands to be a particular loser in this new era of harder borders and falling world trade.

So far – always that caveat – the opposite has been true.

“Certainly Australia is one of the winners,” says Yeaman, who in a research note earlier this year warned his banks’ clients of that “new economic order”.

Counterintuitively, in a world of higher American tariffs our goods exports to the United States have doubled.

Thanks to an explosion in beef sales and especially gold exports, international sales to the US have gone from $16.8bn in the first 10 months of 2024 to $33.2bn in the equivalent period of 2025.

The “baseline” minimum 10% American tariff applied to Australian imports is bad. But it’s less bad than some of the extraordinary taxes that have been imposed on many other countries, something the Albanese government has been keen to point out.

That has in…