Trump tariffs drop to 10% universal rate for countries except China for 90 days

[reader]

From CNBC

• President Donald Trump has dramatically reversed course, dropping his country-specific tariffs down to a universal 10% rate for all trade partners except China.
• China’s tariff rate will jump to 125%, effective immediately, the White House says.
• White House advisors claim the flip flop was always the strategy, suggesting that the past week of massive tariffs that triggered huge market losses was all for show.
• Beijing has reciprocal 84% tariff rate on U.S. goods, effective April 10.
• The EU approved retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports.
• China issued new travel warnings for its citizens about visiting the United States.
• Trump’s job approval rating fell as most Americans said his tariff plan goes “too far.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trump-tariffs-live-updates.html

[floridarob]

Smells of market manipulation....imagine the money that's been made for people in the know during this short period.

[Keithambrose]

2 hours ago, floridarob said:

Smells of market manipulation....imagine the money that's been made for people in the know during this short period.

Yes, I wondered if that was the plan. Quite likely. Would be astonishingly corrupt,  but.....

[reader]

Trump telegraphed his intention, well ahead of tariffs announcement.

From CNBC

Trump’s morning ‘buy’ call nets huge returns for those who listened

At 9:37 a.m. ET, just minutes after the opening bell, Trump posted on Truth Social that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” That post ended with the letters “DJT,” which is both the president’s initials and the ticker for Trump Media & Technology, the parent company of Truth Social that he holds a majority stake in.

Theoretically, for anyone who bought into the market that minute on Trump’s urging, they netted a big return. Stocks shot up in a historic reversal in afternoon trading after Trump announced a walkback on some tariffs, a stark turn after the unveiling of his plan to tax imports last week torpedoed the market.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trumps-morning-buy-call-nets-huge-returns-for-those-who-listened.html

 

[PeterRS]

When will Trump realise that he cannot win in a trade war with China. He can hike tariffs as much as he wants but China will brave it out. At the same time, the US consumer will lose out - at least in the short term. WIth his ridiculous list of tariffs announced prior to his backing down, five top tech leaders who supported him have collectively lost around $1.8 trillion since the start of the year. 

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/09/tech/tech-leaders-supported-trump-lost-money-dg/index.html

Similarly, he backed down not for the stated reasons but because his Treasury and Commerce Secretaries had warned him of the danger of a sharp sell-off of normally safe US government bonds. As CNN reports, Trump's threshold for political pain is precisely one week! 

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/09/politics/trump-tariffs-retreat-bond-market/index.html

[vinapu]

all that reads as operetta script. Is that how Made Great Again America should look and behave like ?

[reader]

15 minutes ago, PeterRS said:

 Trump's threshold for political pain is precisely one week!

And we're all better off it was so brief.

But we shouldn't forget the architect of the fiasco: economist Peter Nazarro. He first made his appearance on the national stage during Trump's first term when he proved what a fool he was when he attacked Dr. Anthony Fucci, rejecting his efforts to combat Covid and persuading Trump that hydroxychloroqine was a surefire cure.

It should have surprised no one that he had his sights set on China. As far back as 1979, while a student at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, began authoring books (The Coming China Wars, Death by China) on the dangers China posed to not just the region but the world. Even as far back as 2016, he was advocating for strong tariffs on China.

And when Elon Musk called him a moron yesterday, you get the idea of just how over the edge this guy is.

 

[Keithambrose]

5 hours ago, reader said:

And we're all better off it was so brief.

But we shouldn't forget the architect of the fiasco: economist Peter Nazarro. He first made his appearance on the national stage during Trump's first term when he proved what a fool he was when he attacked Dr. Anthony Fucci, rejecting his efforts to combat Covid and persuading Trump that hydroxychloroqine was a surefire cure.

It should have surprised no one that he had his sights set on China. As far back as 1979, while a student at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, began authoring books (The Coming China Wars, Death by China) on the dangers China posed to not just the region but the world. Even as far back as 2016, he was advocating for strong tariffs on China.

And when Elon Musk called him a moron yesterday, you get the idea of just how over the edge this guy is.

 

I understand  that In his book, Navarro quotes an 'expert' extensively.  The expert is himself, using a name made up of the letters in his own name, jumbled up. Interesting!

[reader]

On 4/10/2025 at 3:43 AM, Keithambrose said:

I understand  that In his book, Navarro quotes an 'expert' extensively.  The expert is himself, using a name made up of the letters in his own name, jumbled up. Interesting!

Adding to his resume, Navarro spent March 19–July 17, 2024, incarcerated in the elderly prisoner unit of a U.S. Federal penitentiary for charges related to Contempt of Congress.

[reader]

Phones, computers, chips exempt from new tariffs

From CNBC

Smartphones and computers are among many tech devices and components that will be exempted from reciprocal tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, according to new guidance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The guidance, issued late Friday evening, comes after Trump earlier this month imposed 145% tariffs on products from China, a move that threatened to take a toll on tech giants like Apple, which makes iPhones and most of its other products in China.

The guidance also includes exclusions for other electronic devices and components, including semiconductors, solar cells, flat panel TV displays, flash drives, and memory cards.

The exemptions are a win for tech companies like Apple, which makes the majority of its products in China. The country manufactures 80% of iPads and more than half of Mac computers produced, according to Evercore ISI.

“This is the dream scenario for tech investors,” Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC. “Smartphones, chips being excluded is a game changer scenario when it comes to China tariffs.”

He added that the tariffs have been a “black cloud over tech since the day of liberation, because no sector was going to be more hurt than big tech.”

“I think ultimately big tech CEOs spoke loudly, and the White House had to understand and listen to the situation that this would have been Armageddon for big tech if were implemented,” Ives said.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/12/trump-exempts-phones-computers-chips-tariffs-apple-dell.html

[Keithambrose]

6 hours ago, reader said:

Adding to his resume, Navarro spent March 19–July 17, 2024, incarcerated in the elderly prisoner unit of a U.S. Federal penitentiary for charges related to Contempt of Congress.

Ideal for a Trump adviser.

[vinapu]

3 hours ago, Keithambrose said:

Ideal for a Trump adviser.

+1

 

[PeterRS]

10 hours ago, reader said:

Phones, computers, chips exempt from new tariffs

Smartphones and computers are among many tech devices and components that will be exempted from reciprocal tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, according to new guidance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Methinks the Emperor's new clothes are becoming rather obvious.

[a-447]

Trump's constant back flips would make an Olympic gymnast proud!

The day after he boasted the rest of the world was kissing his ass, he blinked when they stood up to him.

And now another back down on computer equipment, all because he misjudged China's resolve and their determination to stand up to the bully.

So humiliating! But so funny!

😂😂😂

There is more humiliation to come for Trump. 

He will be forced to back down over Canada, Greenland, the Gaza strip and the Panama Canal.

And of course, he'll be the one contacting China over the trade war, not the other way around.

[PeterRS]

Americans, certainly those who voted for Trump, tend to forget that one of his key mentors was "one of the most reviled men in American history." He came to fame as chief counsel for the fiercely anti-communist Joseph McCarthy's Senate sub-committee in the 1950s. A lawyer of the most notorious kind, a tax cheat and swindler, he counted mobsters as well as Presidents among his clients. He was indicted four times for stock-swindling, obstructing justice, perjury, bribery, conspiracy, extortion, blackmail and filing false reports. Three times he was aquitted and the fourth ended in a mistrial "giving him a kind of sneering, sinister sheen of invulnerability."

Robert Cohen, a lawyer at one of his firms said, "He was the man to see if you wanted to beat the system.  He did whatever he wanted, and felt he was good enough at everything to get away with it, and he did it for a very, very long time." Another attorney in his office said, "Roy couldn't have given less of a shit about the rules." Cohn himself once was quoted in Penthouse magazine, "I decided long ago to make my own rules."

The quotes above and below are from Politico and come from a documentary made about him in 2019. The article continues -

He didn’t pay his bills, all but daring his creditors to sue him for what he owed—tailors, locksmiths, mechanics, travel agencies, storage companies, credit card companies, stationery stores, office supply stores. He didn’t pay people back, “friend or foe,” wrote his biographer, Nicholas von Hoffman, who reported that a captain of his yacht called Defiance “had a mental map” of “ports we couldn’t go into because we owed thousands of dollars.”

He didn’t pay his taxes, either, racking up millions of dollars in liens. Taxes, he believed, went to “welfare recipients” and “political hacks” and “bloated bureaucrats” and “countries whose people hate our guts.” He ceaselessly taunted the IRS, calling it “the closest thing we have in this country to a Nazi or Soviet-type agency”—subpoenas from which, he said, went straight into “the wastebasket” . . . 

Cohn became for Trump something much more than simply his attorney. At a most formative moment for Trump, there was no more formative figure than Cohn . . . Deflect and distract, never give in, never admit fault, lie and attack, lie and attack, publicity no matter what, win no matter what, all underpinned by a deep, prove-me-wrong belief in the power of chaos and fear.

Trump was Cohn’s most insatiable student and beneficiary. “He didn’t just educate Trump, he didn’t just teach Trump, he put Trump in with people who would make Trump,” Marcus, his cousin, told me. “Roy gave him the tools. All the tools.”

Roy Cohn, this extreme gay-bashing homophobe was secretly gay himself and was to die of AIDS aged 59. Six weeks earlier he had finally been disbarred as a lawyer. Trump certainly is not gay but in every other respect he is the near spitting image of hits mentor.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/19/roy-cohn-donald-trump-documentary-228144/

[a-447]

Of, dear!

Now yet another back flip. It's getting hard to keep up with all this chaos.

"until Friday, electronics from China were subject to the 145 per cent tariff rate. Then the Trump administration exempted them from all but the 20 per cent tariff rate in place due to fentanyl. And now the muddy signals are that these products will face an entirely new and separate tariff rate, to be announced in a month or so."

[PeterRS]

3 minutes ago, a-447 said:

Now yet another back flip. It's getting hard to keep up with all this chaos.

It is all so typical of Trump's mentor, Roy Cohn, who believed deeply as I quoted above, "Deflect and distract, never give in, never admit fault, lie and attack, lie and attack, publicity no matter what, win no matter what, all underpinned by a deep, prove-me-wrong belief in the power of chaos and fear."