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When you're a forward thinker, the only thing you're afraid of is business as usual. Workday is the AI platform that transforms the way you manage people and money today so you can transform tomorrow. It's how we're moving business forever forward. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world.
Today is Liberation Day, when Donald Trump is announcing a new round of tariffs. But will these levies really make America rich again? We delved into The Economist's archive to find out what happened the last time tariffs were this high in the 1930s. And in recent weeks, many countries in the Northern Hemisphere have moved into daylight savings time, bringing glorious light evenings. But some scientists don't share my delight and reckon that springing forwards an hour is bad for our health.
First up, though. In Ukraine, an election may not seem like a high priority right now. But in the midst of ceasefire negotiations, both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump highlighted that elections in Ukraine are overdue. And they questioned Volodymyr Zelensky's legitimacy as president. A dictator without elections, Zelensky better move fast or he's not going to have a country left. Gotta move, gotta move fast.
that war is going in the wrong direction. In the meantime, we're successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia. Under Ukraine's constitution, elections can't happen while the country is under martial law. But Zelensky is indeed now moving fast to send Ukrainians to the polls, if that's at all possible. For months... MAGA America and the Kremlin have been singing from the same hymn sheet about the need to get rid of Zelensky. Oliver Carroll is our Ukraine correspondent.
They've called him illegitimate and they've pushed for elections in the middle of war. Their belief, it seems, has been that Ukrainian voters will do them the favour and unseat their main foe. But those assumptions have been largely undone. by Mr. Trump himself in the animosity of the White House showdown. That episode upturned Mr. Zelensky's ratings in the eyes of his population and it appears to change his own calculus. My information is that...
Mr. Zelensky is seriously considering presidential elections and a lot quicker than we might have thought. But Ollie, we've talked about this so many times on the show. I thought they couldn't have elections until the end of the war because there's martial law. Completely right. Martial law forbids any elections. So if indeed we're talking about an election campaign coming up in the next few months, the first signal of that we'll see.
before May the 5th, which is the parliamentary deadline for the extension of that martial law, and which will essentially run out on May the 8th. From that, there's a 60 or 90 day minimum, depending on who you listen to. for the electoral committee to organise the vote. It's a majorly difficult issue, just getting the votes for those who are abroad. How does a soldier vote? How does a soldier even, if he wants to, put himself up for election? Lots of things are subject to change.
here. And just because the presidential office might want this vote to happen doesn't mean it's at all possible. Olly, could you have an election without a ceasefire? I can't see that happening and I don't think anybody in Ukraine would want to see that happening. The other thing to say is there's nothing that Putin has said publicly that would suggest he's... ready to go to a ceasefire. Putin has been showing maximalism. Russia hasn't...
move very much from their initial peace plan, which is the full surrender of Ukraine. There is this naval ceasefire and energy ceasefire which has been supposedly agreed on, but it's been subject to conditions which the Russians have put out and which...
frankly, aren't likely to happen anytime soon. But still, Mr. Trump appears to believe, and some certainly also agree with him, that the force of his personality will impose some kind of ceasefire. Up to now, he hasn't really considered the possibility that... Vladimir Putin might not play along. There are signs he's awakening to Mr. Putin's bluster, but those signs aren't unequivocal and for the time being do appear to be a negotiation ploy rather than a major change in position.
Taken widely, at the moment, the vote doesn't make a lot of sense. But as I said, I do know that there is significant preparations going on and it does seem that the calculus, as I said, has changed. So how far are preparations for elections really just a response to what Trump said about Zelensky calling him a dictator?
I think they're an indirect response because that rhetoric and the behavior in the White House has, as I said, bolstered his standing inside Ukraine and that has created a new set of dynamics. So according to closed polling I've seen... Mr Zelensky was polling behind Valery Zeluzny, his former top general who was exiled to London to be his ambassador. That completely was switched on its head. And according to, again, our own poll, which we conducted in the week after the White House showdown.
Mr Zelensky was polling at 45% over Mr Zeluzny's 30%, suggesting he'd win pretty comfortably in the second round. Zelensky's hope is that his quick steps will wrong-foot the opposition, including Mr Zeluzny. And Mr Solution in particular will be persuaded by means fair and foul.
not to run. There have been points in the past, a year ago, they had been thinking about running a vote at a time when they still had good ratings. They were persuaded against doing that by many partners, including those in the West.
And there was a certain regret about that because since then Ukraine's position has taken a dive both on the diplomatic and the military front. So they see an opportunity now which they think might not come around again. And what about the threat of Russian interference? in any election that would be held? Well, at the moment, according to our polls and all the polls which are being done, there's only really one candidate who could unseat Zelensky, and that is Zaluzny.
Russia has invested in various different candidates, none of whom at the moment would show any promise at the ballot box. Obviously, Russia will try to influence the elections in many ways. It has been trying to do so since the start of the war. Certainly in the first couple of years, its influence was very limited by the fact there was a huge patriotic upsurge and many of their agents were exposed and so on and so forth. But still, you see now...
a very heavy influence campaign through various social media influencers, opposition activists, opposition MPs and so on. I was speaking to an intelligence officer just last week in Kiev and he said the first three years of war... Ukraine was focused on the battle in the east. This year, he said, the main battle will be the internal battle. And Oli, given that Trump and Putin wanted an election basically to unseat Zelensky...
Now it looks like Zelensky would win if there was an election. Aren't they going to achieve exactly the opposite of what they wanted? Quite. But, you know, if you think this war will stick to a new plan, you're mistaken. I've seen this many times before.
been covering this war since 2014. And I remember speaking to a very confident European official in, I think it was 2016 or 2017, where he said the war was over, ceasefire was imminent, agreement with Putin was going to happen because it was... in russia's interest and there was an agreement in principle it isn't over now it was never over then and the elephant in the room is very much still mr putin who's in my opinion yet to make up his mind he's still there
And for all his bluster, Trump's leverage over Putin is still quite limited. Oli, great to talk to you. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Are you a forward thinker? Then you need a HR and finance platform that is too. Workday is the AI platform that helps propel your organization, your workforce and your entire industry into the future.
It's how we're moving business forever forward. This intelligence podcast is sponsored by Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. When you need to build workflows, you don't want to rely on admins or IT. The no-code setup makes Monday.com easy for anyone to get started. It's easy to build dashboards and reports too, so you can get real-time insights across teams and projects. It even comes with AI to speed up workflows and boost efficiency.
In an act of textbook Donald Trump marketing, today is Liberation Day in America. The U.S. president is expected to unveil a sheaf of tariffs on imports. But in practice, there'll be nothing liberating about them. America's overall tariffs are expected to reach their highest level since the Second World War. And if we look to history, we can see why levies are likely to hurt growth, raise prices and worsen inequality.
Tariff mania is not a new phenomenon. It's got a long history in America. The prosperity boom of the 20s had exploded like a giant soap bubble, and the United States tumbled down into a bottomless abyss of depression. In 1930, the year after the Wall Street crash, a tariff act was signed into law. Andrew Knox is one of our news editors. That bill sparked a trade war between America and its allies. It deepened the Depression and caused the world to break into rival blocs.
I and my colleague Frasier McElrath delved into the archives here at The Economist to look at how we reported on the Tariff Act of 1930 and see whether there are any instructive comparisons between that and the present day. won the election in 1928, and part of his platform was a promise to prop up U.S. farming. The American agricultural sector had been suffering because Europe had become competitive again after having suffered real production problems following World War I.
When Hoover became president, he asked Congress to form a commission to look into putting tariffs on agricultural produce from abroad. In 1929, Reed Smoot, a senator from Utah, and Willis Hawley... a congressman from Oregon, together came up with a bill that would create such tariffs. That bill, designed with the intent of helping American farmers, would hit all of America's trade partners.
It took about 18 months for the bill to get from its original introduction through onto the president's desk. In the meantime, Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister... responded by raising tariffs on the United States and lowering them for the British Empire. It wasn't just the Canadians who were concerned. More than a thousand American economists wrote to Herbert Hoover begging him to veto the bill when it came out of his desk.
He didn't. The act passed in June 1930. The Economist was pretty critical of it in its reporting. The signature by President Hoover of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Bill at Washington is the tragicomic finale to one of the most amazing chapters in world tariff history. And it is one that protectionist enthusiasts the world over would do well to study.
And a measure which started with the single objective of giving satisfaction to the farmer emerges as a fully-fledged High Tariff Act in which nearly 900 duties have been raised, some extravagantly. Liberal Party lost a snap election to the conservatives, who promised even steeper tariffs and more aggressive action against America.
That was the approach taken by most countries, who thought that responding aggressively to America's trade policy was the best way to go. And so the world split off even more into rival trading blocs. Those economies suffered damage from this drop in trade and not least America's which suffered an enormous amount of pain. But it's important to situate all of this within the context of the Great Depression. There were bigger macroeconomic forces at play.
The value of American imports and exports between 1929 and 1932 fell by about 70%. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs contributed to that, but they weren't the only thing happening. And it's important to note that America's economy was a lot more closed then and that the tariffs didn't cover all kinds of goods.
After the passage of the Tariff Act and these economic effects, protectionism started to lose its popularity. By the start of the new Congress in 1931, the Democrats, traditionally much more skeptical of tariffs, had taken control of the House of Representatives. They still had a minority in the Senate, but along with some Republican dissenters who were skeptical about tariffs, they were able to steer trade policy.
Hoover, however, and many other Republicans stuck to their guns. The regular Republican politicians give no indication of any recantation of their faith in the merits of high protectionism. But from all quarters of the country... there is evidence of a steadily growing disillusionment about its virtues as a promoter of prosperity. When the 1932 election rolled round...
Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee for president, accused Republicans of erecting an impregnable barbed wire entanglement between America and the rest of the world. Democratic tariff policy consists in large measure... in negotiating agreements with individual countries, permitting them to sell goods to us in return for which they will let us sell to them goods and crops.
He proposed there should be a trade reset. At the time, The Economist had praise for FDR's high-minded principles, but we were also a little bit concerned as to whether he could actually see them through. Mr. Roosevelt, it is true, continues to revile the existing tariff and to advocate the negotiation of trade treaties with other countries. But while campaigning in the West,
He was constrained to reassure American farmers that such protection as they enjoy would not be taken from them. And it is by no means certain that some of his most influential supporters share his enthusiasm for tariff reduction, even in the case of manufacturers. The economists thought it would be prohibition rather than trade policy that actually decided the 1932 election. In the end, the economic effects of the Depression...
The tariffs, prohibition, all of these things inspired Americans to boot Herbert Hoover out of office and put FDR in there. New York City, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Democrat, heard the news of his election to the president. Smoot and Hawley both lost their seats in this election. In 1934, Roosevelt got Congress to grant him authority to negotiate tariff rights, and that started a period of reducing trade barriers.
That has been America's broad outlook towards tariffs and protectionism ever since. And in 2008, we wrote about Smoot Hawley and said that there were plenty of reasons to think that the terrible lessons of the 1930s wouldn't have to be learned again. Now, in 2025, it's looking like America might need a refresher course. To read more extracts from The Economist's archive reporting on the Smoot-Hawley tariff, head to the finance and economics section of our app.
All across the Northern Hemisphere, countries have been moving into daylight savings time. Natasha Loder is our health editor. On the Monday after the shift, people have lost about 40 minutes of sleep when they come in in the morning. You may find that these effects last for quite a few days after the clocks have shifted. But there's a growing body of evidence that daylight savings time has much more long-lasting effects on our health. Natasha, I've always been a fan of daylight savings time.
But remind me why we introduced it in the first place. So it really took off in World War II when it was introduced to conserve fuel and energy by making more use of natural daylight. And the idea was that the lighter evenings would save on electricity, reduce accidents and encourage more outdoor activity. In modern times, I think the benefits are thought to be far less clear.
And many scientists now arguing, actually, that DST may cause more harm than good. We're talking about long-term impacts on human health.
Long term impacts on human health. I remain sceptical. What are these? I mean, all this comes down to sort of basic human biology. And over millennia, our bodies have evolved to be in sync with the sun. And we have... these internal rhythms our body clocks sometimes they're called but they're circadian rhythms and essentially this clock is triggered by natural daylight and because the wavelength of
daylight varies in the morning and the evening, you can't replace one with the other. You need a certain amount of morning light to trigger your circadian rhythm to get that feeling of sleepiness late in the night. And then if you get too much light late in the day, certainly of the... blue light, then you destroy your melatonin production. And there was a very elegant study which looked at people living on opposite ends of the same time zone in America.
It calculated that throughout the period of DST, which in America can be up to eight months, People were losing on average about 19 minutes of sleep a night. And this is something that lasted throughout the period, not something that wore off. Natasha, haven't our bodies been out of sync with the sun since the advent of fire or at least electricity?
Yes, they have. But what sleep scientists say, or they call themselves chronobiologists, actually, which I find rather intriguing. What they say is that there is no replacing that. early morning light, there is one giant big orb in the sky and that's there for us. And so there's not a lot we can do about it. And you said it's not just about sleep. What are the long-term health impacts?
There's lots of reasons to think that this sleep misalignment is also likely to be tied to conditions like diabetes, episodes of depression and even some cancers. When we look at averages, we also miss the effects on certain groups. I mean, anyone with small children will know absolutely how impossible it is to get them to go to sleep when the clocks change.
Teenagers in particular are already struggling with their body clock at puberty, but then the arrival of DST further compounds this. So if you have ever wondered why your teenager is really so grumpy, that is. the reason they just are not getting enough sleep, even though they did stay in bed till midday on Saturday.
Then there's also short-term effects that we've known for years about DST. In the immediate aftermath of the shift, you're getting spikes in heart attacks and strokes and car accidents. And so it's really quite a challenging time on several levels. Natasha, it's unusual for me to note this, but you're very much aligned with Donald Trump here. He was complaining about daylight savings time just a few weeks ago. Do you think that the US or others might actually abandon it?
countries like Mexico and Turkey have abolished it. Many are discussing it. It's quite a divisive issue. People like you say, I love these long evenings. My answer to you is... It's going to be a longer evening anyway, because that's the way the physics works. Even if we didn't...
shift these time zones suddenly, we would get these longer evenings. They're coming anyway. It's called summer. Donald Trump went notably quiet when DST was introduced after saying he was going to abolish it. Either he's changed his mind. And somebody pointed out to him that the golfing industry does very well out of DST. Or perhaps he's been swayed by Marco Rubio, who a couple of years ago, you will be pleased to know, Rosie.
proposed something with the rather Orwellian title of the Sunshine Protection Act. which was basically saying we want permanent DST. Oh, I see you nodding in pleasure there. And chronobiologists, sleep scientists are appalled because essentially this would mean our bodies were permanently misaligned with... the natural daylight cycle which is standard time look this is bad for everybody and so the people who like daylight savings time well you know why don't you just get up earlier
I shall continue to enjoy sunlight as one of my vices. But for those who are not happy with this shift, have you got tips on how to deal with this terrible thing that's befallen them? Yeah. So look, get outside, have your breakfast in the sunlight. And in the evenings when you're out of doors, maybe you should be wearing... orange sunglasses, the ones that block blue light that will allow you to produce more melatonin and feel sleepy at the time that your body really needs to be asleep.
I do actually own a pair of light blocking orange glasses. Natasha, thank you very much indeed. You're welcome. Thank you, Rosie. that's all for this episode of the intelligence we'll see you back here tomorrow When you're a forward thinker, the only thing you're afraid of is business as usual. Workday is the AI platform that transforms the way you manage people and money today so you can transform tomorrow. It's how we're moving business forever forward.
Since 1929, the Monks Investment Trust's mission has been to help investors grow their wealth. We aim to do this today by taking a three-dimensional approach to growth. Cyclical growth, rapid growth, and steady growth. The Monks Investment Trust, managed by Bailey Gifford. Capital at risk.