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Financial markets declined markedly Wednerday after President Donald Trump unveiled steeper-than-expected retaliatory tariffs on goods imported to the U.S. from other nations.
A baseline 10% tariff was imposed on all nations, starting at midnight on Saturday. On April 9, a range of retaliatory tariffs are set to kick in, including 34% on imports from China and 20% on anything brought in from the European Union.
Wielding a school-presentation-style tagboard with numbers, percentages and nations during a long-anticipated news conference in the White House Rose Garden, Trump laid out the scheme in a characteristically rambling address.
As soon as he detailed the specifics of the long-expected tariffs, exchange-traded funds tracking major stock market indices swung from Wednesday’s close of a gain of about 1% to a decline of 2%. After-hours trade in tech, medical and automotive stocks of companies apt to be hard-hit by the tariffs also plunged.
Responses from the EU, Canada, Mexico and others are expected in the coming hours to the factually challenged, stage-managed “Liberation Day” event at the White House Rose Garden. The newser was covered live by CNN, Fox News and BBC even before Trump stepped before the microphone, as well as on YouTube and TikTok. MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace stayed with a segment on the shellacking of a Trump and Elon Musk-backed candidate in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race for several minutes with a tiny POTUS live at the bottom righthand side of the screen.
The tariffs ranging from 10% to 49% only doubles or triples down on the fact that Trump has always been a big believer in tariffs (since speeches he made 40 years ago, the president noted in one of dozens of tangents). However, the former Celebrity Apprentice host has long had a greater faith in the power of the big show and the spotlight on him, which is what Trump wanted and received Wednesday in this spectacle after the market closed. Whether the uncertainty that is already making itself evident in afterhours trading spirals into a deep economic and political hole could depend on if other nations treat today’s tariffs as the opening of a negotiation or a deep end.
The post Donald Trump’s Steeper-Than-Expected Tariffs On Goods Imported To U.S. Rattle Markets, Stoke Inflation Fears appeared first on Deadline.
