Top Wall Street economist sees 2 ways tariffs could play out, and neither is good for the average worker

Flying between Helsinki, Prague, Milan and Geneva to meet with clients, Nathan Sheets, Citigroup’s top economist, has a bird’s-eye view of how tariffs are reshaping the global economy.

But on the ground, he warns, the consequences of President Donald Trump’s renewed tariff wars are showing up in ways that will hit regular Americans the hardest.

“We haven’t seen tariffs at these kinds of levels in the United States for many decades,” he told Fortune while en route to Zurich. “And so an implication of that is that we’re learning about how tariffs affect the economy in real time.”

Sheets, who also served in former President Barack Obama’s administration as the U.S. Treasury’s top economic diplomat, estimates that U.S. consumers are currently bearing about 30% to 40% of tariff costs—but