The global financial markets are being swept by an unexpected cold wave.

After Trump's extreme policy of imposing "reciprocal tariffs" on almost all trading partners, the panic in global capital markets reached its peak:

On April 7, by 10 PM Eastern Time, S&P 500 futures fell 5.98%, Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 6.2%, and Dow Jones futures declined 5.5%.

Asian markets were even more filled with risk-averse sentiment, with the Nikkei index falling as much as 8.9% in early trading. The Taiwan Weighted Index plummeted nearly 10% after two days of holidays, with circuit breakers triggered for major stocks like TSMC and Foxconn.

The crypto market was not spared either.

Investors watched their assets shrink, with red lines on crypto trading screens like an alarm, signaling a larger turbulence.

Data from CoinGlass shows that cryptocurrency liquidations have surged to around $892 million, including over $300 million in BTC long and short positions.

BTC has dropped to around $77,000, while ETH has fallen to $1,500.

The trade war's trumpet has sounded again, with Trump's senior trade advisor Peter Navarro standing at the center of the storm.

On April 6, Navarro appeared in a Fox News interview.

He tried to calm investor emotions with a laughable linguistic art:

"The first principle, especially for small investors, is - unless you sell your stocks now, you won't lose money. The wise strategy is not to panic and hold steady".

Unrealized losses are not losses; if you haven't sold, you haven't lost.

It's hard to imagine such an ineffective consolation, close to a mental victory, coming from a senior presidential trade advisor and university economics professor.

This statement clearly failed to calm market anxiety and instead focused attention on him - this Harvard PhD, dubbed a "non-mainstream economist" by outsiders, who seems not just a policy spokesperson but an unavoidable driving force behind extreme trade protectionism.

Even Musk, who was close to President Trump, recently publicly criticized and subtly mocked this presidential advisor on social media, directly stating that "getting a Harvard economics PhD is not a good thing and might lead to decision-making errors due to excessive self-confidence"; he also questioned whether Navarro had ever created any substantive results.

Who exactly is this economist standing behind Trump? How did he drive this global tariff policy storm?

From the academic margins to the White House's decision-making core, Navarro's life intersecting with Trump's protectionist ideology may have jointly brewed this crisis.

A Marginal Figure from Academia to Politics

Peter Navarro's story begins on July 15, 1959, in an ordinary family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

His father, Albert "Al" Navarro, was a saxophone and clarinet player, and his mother, Evelyn Little John, was a secretary on Fifth Avenue.

However, this family time was brief and turbulent, with his parents divorcing when he was 9 or 10, leaving Navarro to move between Palm Beach, Florida, and Bethesda, Maryland, with his mother.

The experience of growing up in a single-parent family may have planted seeds of desire for stability and self-reliance in his heart, quietly sprouting when he completed his education at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland.

In 1972, with an academic scholarship, Navarro entered Tufts University and earned his bachelor's degree. The same year, he joined the Peace Corps and served in Thailand for three years. This experience gave him his first exposure to the complexity of international society, possibly laying the groundwork for his later focus on global trade imbalances.

In 1979, he obtained a Master's in Public Administration from Harvard University, and in 1986, he earned his doctorate under the guidance of economic titan Richard E. Caves. With his degree in hand, he chose to remain in academia, serving as a professor of economics and public policy at UC Irvine from 1989, becoming an emeritus professor after decades.

However, Navarro was not content to remain in his study. He ventured into politics five times, attempting to put his ideas into practice.

In 1992, he ran for San Diego mayor, leading the primary with 38.2% of the vote but narrowly losing the final election with 48%; subsequently, he ran for city council, county supervisor, and congressional seats, all unsuccessfully - getting 41.9% in the 1996 congressional election and only 7.85% in the 2001 city council special election. These failures did not deter him but instead highlighted his persistence and marginalized nature.

He repeatedly emphasized economic protectionism and employment priority in his campaigns, echoing Trump's "America First" approach, yet failing to win voter support at the time.

From a single-parent family youth to a Harvard economics PhD, and then to a repeatedly defeated political marginal figure, Navarro's trajectory is full of contradictions.

He appears to be both a rigorous scholar and a radical activist; both leaving his mark in academia and experiencing setbacks in politics.

In his back-and-forth between academic and political circles, trade protectionism and a hard stance towards China seemed to have been seeded early on.

The China Threat Theory, Long Traceable

From the moment Peter Navarro obtained his economics PhD from Harvard, he was destined not to be satisfied with the tranquility of the ivory tower.

His subsequent trajectory shows that this new PhD had developed a strong interest in the global economic landscape.

In 1989, when he joined UC Irvine, he began transforming his academic passion into sharp-tongued criticism. His target was directly aimed at a rising power - China.

What truly made him notable was a series of works propagating the China threat theory.

In 2006, he published "The Coming China Wars", warning with an almost prophetic tone that China's economic expansion was not just commercial competition but a survival threat to US manufacturing.

The book revealed an almost biased stubbornness, such as "China's development is a threat to humanity that will bring more conflicts and instability to the world".

At the time, Amazon reader reviews mostly considered the book to have deliberate hype and sensationalism.

While the book did not generate widespread resonance in mainstream economic circles, it did create ripples in some conservative circles.

Five years later, 2011's "Death by China" pushed Navarro's criticism to its peak. This book was not just an academic analysis but more like an indictment.

He radically accused China of systematically destroying the foundations of the US economy through illegal export subsidies, production subsidies, currency manipulation, and intellectual property theft...

However, Navarro's views were not without controversy.