Trump’s Russian aluminum sanctions actually helped Russian consumers

A useful guide to reality, even if not to politics, is that trade sanctions and trade tariffs and protections have the same economic effect – it’s the consumers who lose out. More specifically, it’s the consumers supposedly protected by tariffs who carry the costs.

We can look at this in detail with the effects of Trump’s sanctions against Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch. His company, Rusal, produces some 6 percent of the world’s aluminum. The sanctions mean, roughly enough, that no American can do a deal with Deripaska or any of his companies. In practice, this means that no one who deals with Americans can, nor anyone who might want to sell them something made of aluminum in the future.