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.
Full 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.
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.
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.
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