At the end of a chaotic week for the markets, we ask Bloomberg reporter Shawn Donnan what it’s all been for. Plus, the Supreme Court says the Trump administration must facilitate the return of a man who was erroneously deported, six people died in a helicopter crash in the Hudson River, and why politics and high visa costs have some international music artists rethinking big events in the U.S. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: What are the main headlines in today's episode?
Thanks. Good morning. It's Friday, April 11th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, a look back at this week in tariffs. The Supreme Court says the Trump administration must help bring back a man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador. And why some foreign musicians are thinking twice before coming to play shows in the U.S.
Chapter 2: What is happening with President Trump's tariff policy?
Let's start with the biggest story all week, President Trump's tariff policy. Today, China announced it will raise tariffs on the United States to 125%. That comes after the Trump administration imposed tariffs of 145% on China.
The tit-for-tat retaliatory measures are just the latest in an unnerving week that started with widespread tariffs against dozens of countries, sending markets nosediving, only to be pulled back a few days later on all countries except China. To understand the impact of all of this and what comes next, I called up Sean Donnan, a senior writer for economics at Bloomberg News.
And I started by asking him why the White House reversed itself in the way that it did and what, if anything, this chaotic week has actually accomplished.
Chapter 3: How have tariffs impacted the global economy this week?
So, look, I think the most important thing to remember is that at the end of this week, we have much higher tariffs in place here in the United States than we did before this week. The Yale Budget Lab was out this week with a new analysis. It says the average tariff rate on goods coming into the United States is now at its highest level since 1909.
And we're starting to see in the global economy the impact of that. We're starting to see global trade start to slow down. We're seeing companies cancel shipments, orders from suppliers in China. While President Trump scaled back, his tariffs on 60 or so countries, he's only scaled them back to a 10% baseline that, again, did not exist there a week ago.
There's also a 25% tariff on imported cars that's still in place. There's more sectoral tariffs to come. And over the week leading up to the scaling back, we really had an incredible reaction in global financial markets. Something like 19 or 20 trillion dollars in value was wiped out of global financial markets. Just to give you an idea, you know, the U.S.
economy is about a 30 trillion dollar a year economy. I mean, that's wiping out two thirds of the U.S. economy from global financial markets. It's enormous. And then the night before scale back, just in the kind of last day, The market reaction turned into the bond markets. And what we saw was the yields on U.S. treasuries go up very, very fast.
And that immediately started ringing a different kind of alarm bells. And that seems to have been what caused President Trump to back down. Now, come to the end of this week and I say, look, the story in the financial markets is not over. It's going to drag on for some time. And the tariffs are still there.
Yeah. Well, that moment that you're describing on Wednesday, it sounds like that was a turning point for a lot of people watching closely this tariff policy. I mean, we heard Fox Business senior correspondent Charlie Gasparino, who's been a big supporter of President Trump's, basically say this is not sustainable.
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Chapter 4: Was President Trump's tariff strategy planned or reactionary?
I want to tell you right now that Donald Trump outsmarted the world. Trust me. I'm an American. I support my president. But that's not really what happened here, from what I understand. People focus on the stock market all the time. It's the bond market and the sort of lending markets that's the plumbing of the economy. And those markets were imploding last night.
So was this actually a strategy of Trump's? Are we seeing something that suggests this is a strategy that unfolded in the way he had planned? Or is this really Trump conceding and walking something back because it clearly was too unpopular and unsustainable?
Look, I mean, it depends who you listen to, right? I mean, the White House very quickly started to focus on the number of countries who have come To them, you know, wanting to negotiate new deals and therefore this was the art of the deal and President Trump got the leverage he wanted. He's getting the result that he wants. This is all the plan.
A lot of reporting at the same time indicated that even some senior economic experts. Did not know this was happening, that the scaling back was happening. In fact, Jameson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, was up on Capitol Hill. And there's pictures of him kind of in the middle of testimony, kind of looking at his phone and going, oh, OK, things have changed.
In theory, he should be the person. driving U.S. trade policy or certainly one of the people, you know, in the meetings and at the forefront of that.
So, you know, I mean, he was even admonished in that hearing. It sounds like you're sitting here in front of us. Why is there a big movement on trade policy? Absolutely.
It's almost like he learns from the rest of the world, you know, what someone has done on his portfolio. And that's been a feature of Donald Trump and and how he manages the economy and trade policy going back to his first term. Now, the risk of this, of course, is that Donald Trump somehow gets emboldened by one day's gains, right?
What we saw on Wednesday after he made the announcement was the biggest increase in in the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 that we had seen since 2008, right? You know, this is an enormous movement. Now, there's a lot of people who also tell you that that's not a sign of a healthy market, right? Markets should not be swinging around like this.
And, you know, the United States is supposed to be, and its financial markets are supposed to be a kind of beacon of stability, a safe haven in a storm. And over the last week, they've been anything but.
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Chapter 5: Did the tariff policy achieve any substantial concessions?
How much of the concession talk to you appears to be substantial versus PR, basically?
Look, that's a very good question, but we're only going to be able to see the answer to that when we actually see these deals and how meaningful they are and so on. Donald Trump has a history in the past of kind of proclaiming victory and claiming that he has just secured a magnificent deal. When you scratch under the surface, it's less than that.
So some of the issues that Donald Trump wants to solve in a matter of days with these tariffs are issues that have been there for decades and have been pretty intractable. Now, if he's able to solve those issues, I think a lot of people in the United States will say that's great.
Mm-hmm. Well, so the administration's stated goal and goal, at least, is to bring American manufacturing back to the United States. Can I ask you to just evaluate that vision for a moment? I mean, how realistic is that? What would it look like? How long might it take?
I think a lot of people in the United States feel like one of the consequences of globalization has been the loss of good-paying factory jobs. That's a completely legitimate complaint. There are communities around the United States that have been decimated by deindustrialization.
There's a lot of those communities, in fact, and Donald Trump has built his political support in part on votes in those places. The question is how you do it. During the Biden administration, the idea was industrial policy. We're going to give subsidies to companies to kind of end tax breaks and everything.
And we're going to find other ways to encourage them to make stuff here in the United States, whether it's semiconductors, electric vehicles, other green energy kind of products. They kind of focused on targeted industries. Donald Trump's idea is to instead throw up this kind of defensive wall.
And there's a lot of people, you know, at companies and I hear from manufacturing companies and also economists who say, well, that's OK, we get it. But a lot of the things that we need to to build here in the United States are components that come from overseas.
And if you put up tariffs on steel, well, then what ends up happening is domestic steel prices also go up because they no longer have that competition from overseas. And that makes building a factory here more expensive. We know that there are fewer young people coming into the workforce every year just as a result of demographics.
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