Being tyros on economic issues shouldn’t bar us from trying to see what is going on with Donald Trump’s economically nonsensical tariffs on the entire world, now on hold for some 90 days.

As Planning Secretary Arsenio M. Balisacan says, “Complacency is not an option.”

Our complacency is perhaps partly because the impact of the 17-percent “reciprocal tariffs” Trump plastered on us is limited, averaging less than one percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Balisacan says the limited impact is because of the country’s relatively small exports to the US compared to our Southeast Asian neighbors.

Still, while we have some breathing room, troubling uncertainties ahead force us to keep abreast of other crucial tariffs-related issues Trump unleashed that are destroying the rules-based international order.

Now, one potent issue from Trump’s ill-designed tariffs, as one news website alarmingly put it, is that “Trump’s policies threaten to shake the foundation of the shock-resistant Philippine peso (and) the crackdown on immigration is set to squeeze the country’s key economic lifeline — remittances.”

Any threat to the remittances of our overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) certainly means trouble: dollars sent home by our OFWs are partly keeping our economy breathing.

(There is, as yet, no worrying indications of the impact of Trump’s immigration crackdown on Filipino-Americans)

But global uncertainties about tariffs jeopardizes the mighty American dollar.

A global nervousness is raising the once unthinkable question: could the US dollar be losing its unassailable safe haven status?

”For the past 80 years,” says The Guardian newspaper, “the dollar has held a status as the world’s primary reserve currency, used as a store of value around the globe, as the grease in the wheels of the financial system, and as the medium of exchange in trade.”

Trump, however, hates US dollar supremacy. He has long wanted a weaker dollar in his outdated belief that a weaker dollar helps US goods become cheaper, supports domestic US manufacturing, and reduces the US’s trade deficit.

The shaky confidence in the US dollar, however, also comes just as there is a developing sell-off of US government bonds, known as treasuries.

US bonds are an esoteric, complex issue. But what is happening to it panicked Trump and he had to hit the pause button on his punitive tariffs.

Treasury bonds are essentially IOUs of the US government and they’re how Washington pays its bills.

Bonds supposedly move in the opposite direction to whatever happens in the stock markets, acting as some sort of shock absorber if there are stock market meltdowns. Instead, bonds have behaved like stocks.

Dicey developments in US treasuries aren’t perhaps as engaging to us as the value of the US dollar and its deleterious effect on OFW earnings.

But rising US treasuries rates are also raising real fears about how China will use it to counter Trump after he singled out China. Trump recently imposed a 245-percent tariff on Chinese goods.

China holds so many US bonds, arming her with the “nuclear option of dumping US treasuries.”

In fact, some have suggested without evidence that Trump’s climb-down from tariffs last week was reportedly instigated by China, which also holds many US treasuries indirectly in Europe.

China may not, however, play the US bond card. China has “an interest in their value. It could cut both ways and China does need somewhere to park its enormous hard currency reserves,” says China analyst Kaiser Kuo.

Which only means that we need to closely watch the dangerous uncertain outcomes of the all-out US-China trade war, as anything about China inevitably involves us.