What is happening is brutal, but this is not the end of globalisation. World trade will continue, markets will recover, multinationals will go on making their products and shipping them around the world, and we will go on travelling abroad for holidays and work.

For all the hyperventilation about Donald Trump’s tariffs being a catastrophe, they will correct some of the excesses of globalisation.

As a result we will end up with a more robust world economy, with shorter supply chains, and less reliance on uncertain regimes on the far side of the globe.

More about that in a moment. First we have to get from here to there, and the next few months are going to be hard. The world economy is resilient and its giant corporations and financial institutions will figure out how to cope.

But disruption is never good and what is happening is at the outer edges of their experience.

But look at how Russia has responded flexibly to severe economic sanctions. It has been damaged, but has found other markets for its exports, including oil and gas. And it has, at a price, been able to import what it wants. You can still buy a Bentley in Moscow.

Under pressure: For all the hyperventilation about Donald Trump’s tariffs being a catastrophe, they will correct some of the excesses of globalisation

There will be damage now. Economists are running models to predict how big the hit will be, whether the US will go into recession, and so on. The problem is this analysis relies on past data and there is nothing helpful there.

We have not had a sudden increase in tariffs on this scale since the 1930s, when the world was both more fragile but also less interdependent than today. This uncertainty explains the chaos in the markets.

A few weeks ago the mood was positive. Equities were hitting all-time highs. Tariffs, the markets thought, would barely dint a booming world economy. Most New York investment strategists were forecasting even higher levels by the end of this year. Now hubris has flipped to nemesis.

It’s tempting to blame the collapse of equities around the world on Donald Trump, but US share prices were already vulnerable.

They were at the top end of their historic valuations and were waiting for some trigger to push them back. The Donald pulled that trigger. But an equity bear market does not necessarily lead to a deep recession.

Since the economic models don’t help, we have to make an intuitive guess about that. Mine is that the overall loss of output will turn out to be less than it was after the financial crisis of 2008-9, and much less than what we saw in the aftermath of the pandemic. Besides, there will be pluses. Building resilience is one.

World trade, along with technology, has been the driver of the surge in living standards over the past half century or more. But it is not sensible to have more than 60 per cent of semiconductors – and 90 per cent of the most advanced ones – made in one place, Taiwan. Or to have 90 per cent of iPhones assembled in China.

Another plus will be to alert protectionist countries to the cost of their behaviour. I hope the European Union will learn to temper its hostile attitude towards the UK in trade negotiations.

The most recent example of that was the Commission shutting out British defence companies, along with American ones, from the EU defence fund. No surprise that Europe will be harder hit than we are by Trump’s tariffs.

What we will see is not the death of globalisation, but a change in its nature. Instead of shipping goods around the world, we will send money and ideas. That is already happening.

Instead of offshoring, it has been near-shoring and friend-shoring. International trade in goods has not risen as a proportion of global output for nearly 20 years, but investment flows have boomed. So too has trade in services. And since the UK is second only to the US as a services exporter, that is hugely to our benefit.

Whisper it low, because we will inevitably be caught in the crossfire. The plunge in the FTSE 100 index reflects that. But the UK may end up doing quite well out of this tariff war. Fingers crossed and tin hats on.

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