Canada says it will fight U.S. tariffs with countermeasures
Canada will fight U.S. tariffs with countermeasures, Prime Minister Mark Carney said yesterday, though the White House didn’t roll out additional levies on Canadian imports in Trump’s highly anticipated massive tariffs plan.
While Canada is not among the 185 nations facing Trump’s newly announced “reciprocal” tariffs, the 25% duties slapped on Canadian goods remain in place and the 25% auto tariffs would also begin soon, Carney told reporters.
“We are going to fight these tariffs with countermeasures,” Carney said. “We are going to protect our workers, and we are going to build the strongest economy in the G7.”
He said U.S. tariffs will “directly affect millions of Canadians.”
“In a crisis, it’s important to come together,” he added. “It’s essential to act with purpose and with force. And that’s what we will do.”
Australian PM: 'This is not the act of a friend'
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that Trump’s 10% tariffs on the country are “not the act of a friend” but added that he won’t retaliate against the U.S.
“This is not the act of a friend,” Albanese told reporters. “The administration’s tariffs have no basis in logic, and they go against the basis of our two nation’s partnership.”
However, he said Australia won’t join a “race to the bottom that leads to higher prices and slower growth” for the country’s households.
Trump singled out Australia’s ban on the import of U.S. beef as the reason for what he called a “reciprocal tariff.” In 2003, Australia prohibited fresh beef imports from the U.S. due to the detection of mad cow disease in U.S. cattle.
Australia charge no duties on U.S. imports, Albanese said. adding that a “reciprocal tariff would be zero, not 10%.”
U.S. stocks set to plunge Thursday
Major U.S. stock indexes were set to plunge Thursday in the wake of Trump's shock tariffs announcement, with some $2 trillion in market value set to be erased from the S&P 500, according to Bloomberg News calculations.
S&P 500 futures were off 3.3%. Nasdaq futures were down 3.8%. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures declined 2.8%, or more than 1,100 points.
More than 90% of companies in the S&P 500 were lower in premarket trading, with more than half down at least 2%.
Trump's history-making tariffs in a chart
A chart from Evercore ISI, an investment banking firm, highlights just how big Trump's tariffs are.
The firm below charts average U.S. tariffs, with the sizable and historic Smoot-Hawley Act toward the left. To the right, you can see just how aggressive Trump's tariff plan is: Evercore estimates that U.S. tariffs will exceed a weighted average of 25% — well above Smoot-Hawley.
U.K. stocks fall as Starmer hopes to reach a trade deal
Despite only meeting the baseline 10%, Trump's reciprocal tariffs led to shares in London falling Thursday, stoking widespread fears of a global recession.
The FTSE 100 stock index still fell 1.4% as of 10:27 a.m. GMT (5:27 a.m. ET), while the FTSE 250 index dropped 1.3%.
London felt the soft impact of Trump's announcement after being hit with the lowest import duty rate of 10% — which it said was the result of the country's efforts to strike a new trade partnership with the U.S.
“Nobody wins in a trade war. That is not in our national interest,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement Thursday, adding, “I will only strike a deal if it is in the national interest.”
Following Trump's announcement, Starmer met with business leaders in Downing Street, where he warned them, “Clearly, there will be an economic impact from the decisions the U.S. has taken, both here and globally.”
Britain’s already-sluggish economy is vulnerable to a global economic slowdown due to its manufacturing sector forming part of the European supply chain, though its exports are mostly in services.
The British government will consider responding to Trump's measures "with a cool head," Starmer said Thursday, with hopes that a new trade deal could see tariffs on British exports lifted.
From Negronis to Guinness, Americans can expect to pay more at the bar
Among the latest round of sweeping reciprocal tariffs imposed by President Trump was also a 25% levy on all U.S. beer imports, affecting Mexican Corona, Dutch Heineken and Irish Guinness.
While industry experts were relieved that Trump's threats of a 200% tariff on European alcohol did not materialize Thursday, along with 25% tariffs on Mexican tequila and Canadian whiskey, they warned that the tariffs will likely still hit sales among U.S. drinkers for European makers of wine and spirits, which amounted to 2.9 billion euros ($3.18 billion) of exports last year.
Italian trade association Federvini president Micaela Pallini warned Thursday that production of drinks like champagne and Scotch whisky cannot move from specific countries or regions.
“Many labels, which cannot be replaced by local production, will disappear from the tables of U.S. consumers, while a serious production and employment crisis is looming in Italy and Europe,” Pallini said in a statement, according to Reuters.
In March, Diageo, which sells billions of dollars worth of tequila and Canadian whisky in the U.S., wrote a letter to the U.S. Trade Representative suggesting an alternative to tariffs, where it implored the government to consider tougher rules of origin requirements in trade agreements.
It warned that Trump’s tariffs on Mexico and Canada could result in a $200 million hit to operating profit in the company’s second half alone.
Meanwhile, Japanese drinks maker Suntory said it would now focus on selling its spirits in countries where they were originally produced.
Stateside, the president and CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, Chris Swonger, said the decades-long, mostly zero-for-zero tariffs in the spirit industry had benefitted the U.S. and warned that U.S. jobs linked to European spirits imports would also be under threat.
U.S. layoffs surged in March thanks to DOGE cuts: Report
Federal job cuts resulted in the U.S. seeing the third-highest number of layoffs ever recorded in a single month in March, according to a report from jobs and career consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
The report said cuts enacted by the Department of Government Efficiency, the effort spearheaded by Elon Musk that's helped scramble the federal workforce, had resulted in 216,215 layoff plans of federal workers and contractors impacting 27 agencies.
In total, 275,240 cuts were registered across the U.S. economy.
“Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] plans to eliminate positions in the federal government. It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs,” Andrew Challenger, senior vice president and workplace expert for Challenger.
So far this year, employers have announced 497,052, the highest year-to-date and quarterly total since Q1 2009, Challenger said.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is slated to release its official monthly jobs report for March tomorrow. Expectations are for approximately 140,000 payrolls added.
Trump wants Europe to pay more tariffs — and up its defense budget
Trump's tariffs on the European Union will hit the economic growth of Belgium, one of its members, at a time when the U.S. is demanding European partners step up defense spending, Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot said today.
“It will, one way or another, hit not only Belgian companies but also our citizens, partly due to a lesser economic growth ... and that at a moment where the same United States demands an increase in defense spending,” Prevot said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The Belgian government announced in February that it would accelerate defense spending by 4 billion euros ($4.2 billion) in the coming months, in order to meet the minimum 2% increase in defense spending agreed to by NATO allies.
The U.S. is Belgium’s fourth-largest export market and crucial for its pharmaceutical and chemical sectors.
Trump's 46% Vietnam tariff could hit Nike, American Eagle among others
In recent years, retailers and brands have turned to Vietnam to manufacture goods from sneakers to couches while moving some or all production out of China.
China’s southern neighbor became a popular alternative for companies trying to avoid the crossfire of U.S. trade tensions with Beijing. Now, as Trump expands his tariff targets, they can no longer steer clear.
Trump said he will put a 46% duty on imports from Vietnam as part of a new wave of global levies announced yesterday. That could soon raise costs for major corporations in the apparel, furniture and toy space, and some of them may pass those increases to consumers in the form of price hikes. The tariffs on Vietnam take effect April 9.
China exported more goods to the U.S. than any other country for more than two decades, but Mexico surpassed China as the top source in 2023. China is now the second-largest supplier to the U.S., accounting for $438.9 billion worth of goods in 2024, according to government data from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
For companies that have looked to diversify the countries they rely on for production and reduce risks from trade conflicts with China, Vietnam has also become a popular place to go. Imports from Vietnam grew to $136.6 billion in 2024, up about 19% from 2023.
Her great-grandfather was behind the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. She thinks Trump’s tariffs are ‘terrible.’
Carey Stewart Cezar, a retired nurse who lives in Baltimore, watched with dismay yesterday as Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports.
Cezar voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election and opposes Trump’s economic policies. But she said she has another reason to be skeptical of Trump’s tariffs: She is a descendant of one of the legislators behind the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, a law that many economic historians believe worsened the Great Depression.
“I think it’s a terrible idea and potentially devastating,” Cezar, 70, said in a phone interview yesterday, a few hours after Trump announced plans to impose duties on goods brought into the United States from other countries. “I think people don’t remember all the harm caused by tariffs in our history.”
Cezar’s great-grandfather Rep. Willis C. Hawley, an Oregon Republican, sponsored the 1930 tariff act with Sen. Reed Smoot, a Utah Republican. The act, which President Herbert Hoover signed into law roughly a year into the Great Depression, increased duties, set off a trade war and — in the eyes of many historians — aggravated the effects of the era’s economic downturn.