A Tariff Pandemic

I’ve seen this movie before.

An "expert" in London once projected doomsday: infection rates of 60–70% of the world’s population. That’s 4.6 to 5.3 billion people. More than 50 million dead.

The world froze. People hid, or were forced to hide. Experts kept shouting nonsense, flooding the air with fear. Economists scrambled to count the losses. Markets crashed. People died. Yes, from the virus, but arguably, many died inside. Crushed by the hysteria, not the disease.

One false prophet is dangerous enough. A thousand is beyond madness. Yet, the world listened. And worse, it cared too much.

That’s the problem.

History forgotten is history repeated. And how quickly we forget.

Maybe it’s human nature to panic, to expect the worst, to see shadows in every corner instead of looking for the light.

Now, it’s not a virus. It’s tariffs. Tariffs are killing the economy, they say. Collapse is inevitable, they claim.

It almost feels biblical: For the love of money is the root of all evil. Not money itself — but the obsessive love for it.

Exporters panic: “We’ll lose money! Lay off the workers!”

Importers panic: “We’ll pay more! Prices are rising!”

Everyone panics. Sound familiar? It’s the same script as the pandemic.

A week into the Covid chaos in March 2020, I wrote a short piece called A Fearvirus Pandemic. I asked:

 “Does technology make humans more fainthearted? I fear the answer is yes. Media thrives on fear. Bad news sells. Good news? Boring. One death in a hundred is a headline. The other 99 survivors? Footnote. Social media supercharges it. Panic is viral. We’ve built a world addicted to drama. Always hungry for the next Armageddon: a population bomb, global cooling, global warming, wars, plagues.”

Uncertainty is marketed as certainty.

“The world will end in 12 years.” Full stop.

“Covid will infect 70% of the population and kill 3.4%.”

Were these numbers scientific? Not really. But fear needs numbers. Drama needs headlines.

Because if they were genuinely trying to educate, they would have given us balanced, accurate numbers.

They didn’t. They sold fear. And we bought it.

Five years on, we’re still paying the price. And in some ways, it’s getting worse.

In 2019, Indonesia’s government debt stood at Rp 4,778 trillion.By 2022, it soared to Rp 7,767 trillion. Nearly Rp 3,000 trillion in just three years.

It took a full decade, from 2009 to 2019, to accumulate that much debt. But under the Covid panic? Barely three years.

The U.S.? Same story. Between 2000 and 2022, U.S. federal debt exploded by $8 trillion.Before that, it took nine years — from 2010 to 2019 — to grow by the same amount.

Panic shortens time. Panic accelerates debt.

Like public health experts, economists love their extreme projections. It’s either doomsday or jackpot. Rarely anything in between.

And politicians? They'll take whichever forecast serves their hunger for power. The businessmen care only their money.

The masses love drama. And in the social media age, drama is cheap, instant, and addictive. Everyone wants to be part of the story.

Today, anyone with a smartphone with AI can claim to be an expert.

But as the old joke goes, Experts always have a solution, especially when there’s no problem.

And so, the world will soon spin itself into a tangled, noisy mess.

A new cycle of fear pandemic. Or, maybe sanity will show up once in a while? Stay tuned to your smartphone.