President Donald Trump has raised the United States' tariffs on foreign goods to an estimated 17.3% since taking office, the nation's highest since before World War II, according to the Yale University Budget Lab.

The figure includes the latest agreement reached with the European Union this past weekend, bringing the levies to just below the 20% seen during tariff increases in the years after the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act, reported the Financial Times on Tuesday. 

Although the president had threatened tariffs several times but reversed course on them, he has been able to lock in deals for high tariffs on nearly 45% of all U.S. imports, but the tariffs could also force changes in global trade, said Cornell University professor of trade policy and economics Eswar Prasad. 

"Trump has engineered a new era of U.S. trade protectionism that will eventually reverberate through the entire global trading system," he told the Financial Times. 

Alan Wolff, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, further said that the tariffs can cause "shifts in patterns in trade," with some companies moving their supply chains. 

"The U.S., the world's best market in Trump's view, is now not as good as it was," Wolff said. "Companies may look for other places to sell their goods, where their access has not been impaired."

Trump has also reached deals or offered arrangements to other countries to cover 60% of U.S. imports subject to reciprocal tariffs, with the exclusion of imports from Canada and Mexico. A separate tariff rule affects those nations, with Trump's push on border security and trafficking in fentanyl. 

Trump's deal with the EU is the largest in a series of agreements, but still falls short of his goal to reach 90 deals over a 90-day reciprocal pause he started in April. 

The markets are responding well to the deals, but many have left other nations concerned that their tariff rates are much higher than they were when Trump took office in January. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. effective tariff rate of 17.3% could climb if Trump follows through on threats to impose reciprocal tariffs on any countries that do not reach a deal with him by this Friday. 

This number could rise further if Trump carries out his threat to impose the full reciprocal tariffs on countries that fail to strike a deal with him by Aug. 1.

There are also questions on some of the agreements Trump has announced. The only joint written statements about the deals so far have been the ones for the U.K. and Indonesia. 

The United States and Japan have also reported different interpretations of that deal, and in Vietnam, officials have not confirmed that they agree with the tariff rates of 20% on all imports from Vietnam and a 40% tariff on any "transshipping," or the transfer of goods or containers to an intermediate destination, then to another place, reported The New York Times.

Investors, though, are welcoming the U.S. tariff agreements that have been made, saying that a trade war seems to have been avoided. 

In recent days, U.S., European, and Japanese stocks have been at record highs, following the market lows in April. 

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