Nervous Googling: Searches for 'recession' and 'tariff' surge as U.S. mood sours

Evidence of Americans' souring mood is everywhere you look. Even in the place you look for evidence: Google.

An unprecedented number of Americans are now googling the word "tariff," an issue of minimal interest to them during last year's presidential election.

There's an even scarier word they're now Googling: "recession," a search trend line that often, but not always, coincides with an economic contraction.

Signs are mounting of U.S. unease with President Donald Trump's North American trade war and it's surfacing in various places: from economic data, to grumbling businesses, to media coverage, and in tense exchanges at the White House.

On Tuesday, the daily White House briefing was dominated by questions about a trade war that has helped eliminate all stock-market gains since the Nov. 5 election.

The chief economist at Moody's is among those who see a surging likelihood of a U.S. recession — Mark Zandi puts it at 35 per cent, and some put it even higher.

It all depends, Zandi told CBC News, on whether Trump's tariff policies remain in place; whether they spread to other countries; and what the retaliation looks like.

"It's all negative. It's just a question of how negative," Zandi said of the current trade uncertainty. But if this continues, he said, "it would result in a full-out, knock-out, drag-out trade war that would result in a global recession."

And that's the context for why Trump has achieved a seemingly impossible feat: making mainstream American media care about trade.

It's unclear if the average Canadian fully grasps how little interest there usually is in trade news here, in part because the U.S. economy is less trade-dependent in general, and less reliant, specifically, on Canada as an export market.

But now everywhere in the news it's tariff, tariff, tariff. 

Networks have correspondents in Canada chronicling the cross-border rage. CNN segments are featuring an unhappy beer-maker in North Carolina, fretting about aluminum tariffs eroding his slim profit margins; others show worried Washington State apple exporters, and Jack Daniel's talking about being yanked from Canadian store shelves.

Doug Ford is now omnipresent on American TV. 

The Ontario premier is — atypically for a sub-national foreign leader — morphing into a household name here, with his high-voltage sabre-rattling and language that is also atypically blunt for a Canadian politician.