Business
Trump reversals on Fed chair, China tariffs send markets higher
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is looking for an offramp from the trade war it started with China this month, calling its tariffs on Chinese goods unsustainable as major retailers warn the White House that U.S. consumers will begin seeing supply shortages and higher prices within weeks.
Markets initially soared on remarks from President Trump and his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, acknowledging the current tariff rate of 145% on China will have to come down “substantially.” But subsequent comments from the White House on Wednesday, that the administration would not lower the rate without reciprocal action from Beijing, cooled enthusiasm on Wall Street.
At the closing bell, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 419 points, or about 1%, while the NASDAQ composite and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index were up 2.5% and 1.67%, respectively.
“There will be no unilateral reduction in tariffs against China,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told Fox News in an interview Wednesday afternoon. “The president has made it clear that China needs to make a deal with the United States of America.”
It is unclear whether China will cooperate, however, when it sees pain setting in first for American households, which could maximize its leverage in trade negotiations. Cailian Press, a Chinese media outlet focused on finance, characterized the administration’s latest rhetoric as “a sign that Trump is already softening stance on his signature tariff policies.”
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that talks with China were “active” over a “fair deal,” and that Beijing has expressed interest in negotiating a deal.
“I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to play hardball with China,’” Trump said Tuesday. “We’re going to be very nice. They’re going to be very nice. And we’ll see what happens.”
Trump also said he was not looking to fire Jerome H. Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, despite posting threats he might do so on social media over Powell’s remarks warning that Trump’s trade policies would increase prices and slow economic growth.
The current 145% rate “is very high, and it won’t be that high. Not gonna be that high,” Trump added. “No, it won’t be anywhere near that high. It’ll come down substantially, but it won’t be zero.”
The president’s remarks came one day after he met with chief executives from three major big box retailers — Walmart, Target and Home Depot — who warned him that supply chain disruptions were already underway and would lead to empty shelves at U.S. stores in a matter of weeks, Axios reported.
In another private meeting Tuesday, at JPMorgan Chase & Co. between Bessent and investors and first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury secretary acknowledged that existing import duties on China were “not sustainable” and that “de-escalation” was necessary with Beijing. The nature of the private meeting, which was preceded by a market surge, renewed concerns about insider trading.
“I wish to be clear,” Bessent said in separate, public remarks Tuesday to a forum of the Institute of International Finance. “America first does not mean America alone. To the contrary, it is a call for deeper collaboration and mutual respect among trade partners.”
The secretary’s remarks echoed an earlier motto from Trump’s first administration, which pursued more moderate trade policies, and marked a departure in tone from just three weeks ago, when the president announced massive tariff increases on countries around the world.
Since then, the president has partially lowered many of those tariff rates, but no new trade agreements have been struck.
“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” Trump said in announcing the global tariff hikes on April 2. “Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years, but it is not going to happen anymore. It’s not going to happen.”
Trump had implemented tariffs on China before his April announcement, levying 20% on Chinese imports over the country’s role in producing precursor chemicals that play a major role in the U.S. fentanyl crisis.
He then increased that to 34% on April 2. China retaliated, prompting Trump to increase tariffs on China to 145%, including the 20% figure applied over fentanyl.
A week of devastating losses on Wall Street after the April 2 announcement, followed by concerning activity in the bond market, ultimately led Trump to lower tariff rates on most U.S. trading partners to a universal 10% rate — welcome relief to allies such as Vietnam, which had faced a 46% tariff rate, and the European Union, hit with a 20% rate. But the 145% rate on Chinese goods remained.
Bessent, in his remarks to the finance institute, struck a conciliatory note on his efforts to get China to the negotiating table.
“China, in particular, is in need of a rebalancing,” Bessent said. “Recent data shows the Chinese economy tilting even further away from consumption toward manufacturing. China’s economic system of growth, driven by manufacturing exports, will continue to create even more serious imbalances with its trading partners if the status quo is allowed to continue.”
“China’s current economic model is based on exporting its way out of troubles,” he added. “It’s an unsustainable model that is not only harming China, but the entire world. China needs to change. The country knows it needs to change. Everyone knows it needs to change, and we want to help it change, because we need rebalancing too.”
Peter Tuchman, a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, summed up Wall Street’s reaction to Trump’s pivot in an X post on Wednesday.
“The market is loving this new language from the [administration] and willingness to begin real negotiations,”Tuchman wrote.
“POSITIVE STEPS,” he said, adding, “just imagine the reaction when they get a deal.”
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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