Trump
Reverses Course on Global Tariffs, Announcing 90-Day Pause
The
president further raised already steep tariffs on China, saying that Beijing
should not have retaliated against his earlier trade actions.
“Hello,
everybody.” [clapping] “Can you walk us through your thinking about why you
decided to put a 90-day pause.” “Well, I thought that people were jumping a
little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know. They were getting a
little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.” “Well, I’m not calling it a trade war,
but I am saying that China has escalated, and President Trump responded very
courageously to that. And we are going to work on a solution with our trading
partners. You might even say that he goaded China into a bad position. They
responded — they have shown themselves to the world to be the bad actors. And
we are willing to cooperate with our allies and with our trading partners who
did not retaliate. It wasn’t a hard message. Don’t retaliate. Things will turn
out well.“ [unclear] “I’ll take a look at this. As time goes by, we’re going to
take a look at it. There are some that have been hard. There are some that, by
the nature of the company, get hit a little bit harder. And we’ll take a look
at that.“ [unclear] “Just instinctively, more than anything else. I mean, you
almost can’t take a pencil to paper. It’s really more of an instinct, I think,
than anything else.“
Ana
SwansonTony Romm
By Ana
Swanson and Tony Romm
Reporting
from Washington
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/us/politics/trump-tariffs-stocks-china.html
April 9,
2025
President
Trump on Wednesday abruptly reversed course on steep global tariffs that have
roiled markets, upset members of his own party and raised fears of a recession.
Just hours after he put punishing levies into place on nearly 60 countries, the
president said he would pause them for 90 days.
But Mr.
Trump did not extend that pause to China, opting instead to raise tariffs again
on all Chinese imports, bringing those taxes to a whopping 125 percent. That
decision came after Beijing raised its levies on American goods to 84 percent
on Wednesday afternoon in an escalating tit-for-tat between the world’s largest
economies.
In a post on
Truth Social, the president said that he had authorized “a 90 day PAUSE” in
which countries would face “a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff” of 10
percent. As a result, nearly every U.S. trading partner now faces a 10 percent
blanket tariff, on top of 25 percent tariffs that Mr. Trump has imposed on
cars, steel and aluminum.
Slumping
markets quickly rallied after Mr. Trump’s post. The S&P 500 climbed several
percentage points in a matter of minutes and closed with a rise of more than 9
percent, sharply reversing days of losses. Wednesday was the best day for the
S&P 500 since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.
Nearly every
stock in the index rose. Airlines, some tech companies and Tesla were among
those companies to soar over 20 percent. Shares of automakers rose sharply even
though 25 percent tariffs on imported cars remain in place. Ford and General
Motors both rose more than 7 percent.
Mr. Trump,
who for days had insisted he was not concerned about the market rout,
acknowledged on Wednesday that the downturn had fed into his decision.
“Over the
last few days it looked pretty glum,” Mr. Trump said. “I thought that people
were jumping a little bit out of line,” he said, in explaining his decision.
“They were getting yippy. They were getting a little bit afraid.”
Mr. Trump’s
change in course came amid a sharp sell-off in U.S. government bond markets and
the dollar, which are typically seen as the safest corner for investors during
times of turmoil. Investors large and small had watched trillions in stock
market value vanish in a matter of days, and economists increasingly sounded
urgent alarms that the United States might be careening toward a recession of
its own making.
Asked
Wednesday if the bond market reaction had caught his attention, Mr. Trump said
he noticed over the weekend that investors were getting “queasy.”
“I was
watching the bond market; the bond market’s very tricky, but if you look at it
now, it’s beautiful,” he said.
The 90-day
halt to tariffs ultimately caused stock prices to skyrocket, prompting the
president to suggest on the sidelines of an event at the White House that the
gains might have set a “record.”
Earlier in
the day, Mr. Trump had told Americans to “BE COOL!” and quickly followed up
with a post saying “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
That
prompted some Democrats to suggest that Mr. Trump was intentionally
manipulating stock markets. In a hearing in the House of Representatives
Wednesday, several Democrats questioned Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade
representative, about the president’s aim.
“It’s not
market manipulation,” Mr. Greer said. “We’re trying to reset the global trading
system.”
The
president announced last week that he would raise tariffs to levels not seen
for a century, a change he said would make global trade more fair even if it
caused some “discomfort.” As markets gyrated, Mr. Trump and his advisers
insisted that they were committed to keeping the tariffs on until other
countries lowered their trade barriers and made other economic changes.
Dozens of
foreign countries raced to assemble delegations to appeal to the Trump
administration. In his hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Greer said he had meetings
Tuesday with officials from Europe, South Korea, Ecuador and Mexico, in
addition to conversations with countries such as the United Kingdom in recent
weeks.
Vietnamese
officials had offered to cut their tariffs on American apples, cherries and
ethanol, and brought along a term sheet to a meeting spelling out changes they
were willing to make, Mr. Greer said. He predicted the negotiations would lead
to “open markets overseas,” creating a “virtuous cycle” for American
manufacturing.
Mr. Greer
criticized the typical way to negotiate trade deals, describing them as “where
you ask others nicely to give you market access and to do a dialogue with you
for several years, and at the end you have no more market access.”
“And then
there’s the Trump way,” he added.
As the
hearing was nearing its end, Mr. Trump sent out his post announcing the pause,
which took the gathering by surprise and rippled through the chamber.
“This is
amateur hour,” shouted Representative Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada. “It
looks like your boss just pulled the rug out from under you.”
But while
Mr. Trump lowered tariffs on most countries globally, at least until July 9,
Wednesday’s events left punitive tariffs in place on China, the second-largest
source of U.S. imports last year.
China makes
the bulk of the world’s cellphones, computers, toys and many other products.
When those items are brought into the United States, importers — most of which
are American companies — are expected to pay more than the cost of the item
itself in fees to the government.
Beijing and
Washington have been engaged in a tit-for-tat conflict since Mr. Trump returned
to the White House. The president has vilified China as an economic aggressor
whose entry into the World Trade Organization decimated workers and communities
across the United States. While China has become a manufacturing powerhouse,
many U.S. industries have benefited from access to the Chinese market.
Asked on
Wednesday whether he expected to continue raising levies on China, Mr. Trump
said no and suggested he was waiting for a call from China’s leader, Xi
Jinping, so the two could work out a deal.
“China wants
to make a deal,” he said. “They just don’t know quite how to go about it.”
Last week,
after Mr. Trump imposed a 34 percent tariff on China, Beijing responded with an
equal levy. Mr. Trump then added an additional 50 percent tariff, which China
matched with a 50 percent levy of its own.
The Ministry
of Commerce announced separately on Wednesday that it was putting export
controls on 12 American companies and had added six more American companies to
its list of “unreliable entities,” meaning they will be mostly barred from
doing business in China or with Chinese companies.
Mr. Trump’s
advisers quickly tried to spin his decision to remove most tariffs globally as
a win and not a capitulation. Mr. Bessent said that the tariffs had worked to
get some of China’s closest neighbors such as Vietnam and Cambodia to seek
deals with the United States.
On Wednesday
afternoon, the president told reporters that he might consider exempting some
U.S. companies from the tariffs, in addition to the 90-day pause. He said his
decision on this would be made “instinctively.”
Reporting
was contributed by Talmon Joseph Smith, Colby Smith, Joe Rennison, Robert
Jimison, Keith Bradsher and Alan Rappeport.
Ana Swanson
covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in
Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
Tony Romm is
a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times,
based in Washington.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário