Business
How Trump’s One-for-One Tariff Plan Threatens the Global Economy
The world economy was already grappling with a perplexing assortment of variables, from geopolitical conflicts and a slowdown in China to the evolving complexities of climate change. Then, President Trump unleashed a plan to uproot decades of trade policy.
In starting a process to impose so-called reciprocal tariffs on American trading partners, Mr. Trump increased volatility for international businesses. He broadened the scope of his unfolding trade war.
In basic concept, the argument for reciprocal tariffs is straightforward: Whatever levies American companies face in exporting their wares to another country should apply to imports from that same country. Mr. Trump has long championed this principle, presenting it as a simple matter of fairness — redress to the fact that many American trading partners maintain higher tariffs.
Yet in practice, calculating individual tariff rates on thousands of products drawn from more than 150 countries poses a monumental problem of execution for a vast range of companies, from American manufacturers dependent on imported parts to retailers that buy their goods from overseas.
“It’s potentially a herculean task,” said Ted Murphy, an international trade expert at Sidley Austin, a law firm in Washington. “For every widget, every tariff classification, you can have 150 different duty rates. You’ve got Albania to Zimbabwe.”
The order that Mr. Trump signed on Thursday directed his agencies to study how to proceed with reciprocal tariffs. That raised the risk of increasing costs for American consumers at a time of deepening concern over inflation, challenging the president’s own vows to bring down prices on groceries and other everyday items. And that heightened the possibility of greater delay from the Federal Reserve in lowering borrowing costs.
It also hastens the diminishing of the world trading system, which has long been centered on multilateral blocs and adjudicated by the World Trade Organization. Mr. Trump is aiming to advance a new era in which treaties give way to country-to-country negotiations amid a spirit of nationalist brio.
The transition threatens to add to strains on global supply chains after years of upheaval. International businesses have contended with an unfolding trade war between the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China. They have confronted impediments to passage through the Suez and Panama Canals, sending shipping prices soaring.
Now, Mr. Trump has presented them with another formidable puzzle.
Under the system that has held sway for three decades, member countries of the World Trade Organization set tariffs for every type of good, extending the same basic rate to all members. They have also negotiated treaties — with other countries, and via regional trading blocs — that have further eased tariffs.
Mr. Trump has long described the United States as a victim of this structure, citing trade deficits with China, Mexico and Germany. In announcing the advent of reciprocal tariffs on Thursday, he served notice that he claims authority to renegotiate the terms to his liking, absent respect for existing trade agreements.
It seemed no coincidence that Mr. Trump made his announcement on the day that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, visited the White House. The United States runs a substantial trade deficit with India, with the value of its imported goods outweighing its exports last year by $45 billion.
Those imports include plastics and chemical products that incur tariffs of less than 6 percent when shipped to the United States, according to data compiled by the World Bank. When similar categories of American goods are exported to India, they confront tariffs ranging from 10 to 30 percent.
If the Trump administration were to lift American levies to equal levels, that would force American factories to pay more for chemicals and plastics.
The same pattern holds across a broad sweep of consumer and industrial products — footwear from Vietnam, machinery and agriculture from Brazil, textiles and rubber from Indonesia.
A leading electronics industry trade association, IPC, on Thursday warned that increased trade protectionism would damage the American economy.
“New tariffs will raise manufacturing costs, disrupt supply chains, and drive production offshore, further weakening America’s electronics industrial base,” the association’s president, John W. Mitchell, said in a statement.
Some experts see in Mr. Trump’s approach a potential negotiating tactic aimed at forcing trading partners to lower their own tariffs, rather than a prelude to the United States lifting its own. If that proves true, the process of calculating new tariff rates might actually lower prices.
“There are a lot of ways this can go very badly for us,” said Christine McDaniel, a former Treasury official under President George W. Bush and now a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. “But if he can get other countries to open up their markets, there is a narrow path where this could end up promoting trade,” she said.
Still others warn that any process of negotiation could be guided less by national objectives than the interests of Mr. Trump’s allies. Tesla, the electric vehicle company run by the administration loyalist Elon Musk, could benefit from exemptions to increased tariffs on key components.
The tumult is leaving companies that operate in the United States having to guess how events will transpire as they weigh the costs of importing parts or finished goods. Business, as the cliché goes, craves nothing more than certainty. That commodity is getting more scarce.
Ever since Mr. Trump’s first term, when he put tariffs on Chinese imports — a policy that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. extended — companies that sell into the American market have shifted some production out of China.
Surging prices to move cargo by container ship have prompted companies to close the distance between their factories and their American customers, a trend known as nearshoring.
Walmart, a retail empire ruled by the pursuit of low prices, has moved orders from Chinese plants to India and Mexico. Columbia Sportswear has scouted factory sites in Central America. MedSource Labs, a medical device manufacturer, has moved orders from factories in China to a new plant in Colombia.
Mr. Trump has challenged the merits of such strategies by threatening 25 percent tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and Colombia, before quickly delaying or setting aside such plans. He has imposed across-the-board levies on steel and aluminum. He has delivered 10 percent tariffs on Chinese imports. Where he may turn next is the subject of a potentially expensive parlor game playing out in corporate board rooms.
Some surmise that the uncertainty stemming from these moves is precisely the point. Mr. Trump has long asserted that his ultimate goal is to force businesses to set up factories in the United States — the only reliable way to avoid U.S. tariffs. The more countries he menaces, the greater the risks for any company that invests in a plant somewhere else.
The trouble is that even businesses with factories in the United States depend on parts and raw materials from around the world. More than one-fourth of American imports represent parts, components and raw materials. Making these goods more expensive damages the competitiveness of domestic companies, imperiling American jobs.
Last week, Ford Motor warned that tariffs on Mexico and Canada would wreak havoc with its supply chains.
“A 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” the company’s chief executive, Jim Farley, said.
For now, the business world is again struggling to divine which of Mr. Trump’s pronouncements are merely a gambit, and which portend real changes.
On spreadsheets maintained by multinational companies, the applicable tariff rates for every country on earth suddenly seem subject to reworking.
Or not.
“We take Trump seriously, but not necessarily literally,” said Mr. Murphy, the trade lawyer. “He talks in broad strokes, but we have to watch what actually emerges.”
Layoffs have continued with another tech company saying it was cutting people to enable it to use more artificial intelligence.
Groupon announced in a security filing this month that it will cut up to 400 jobs, or nearly 25% of its worldwide workforce, as part of a broader restructuring plan to make the platform AI-native. The Chicago company plans to carry out the layoffs in the coming months.
Earlier the company’s Chief Executive Officer Dušan Šenkypl had said the company “fell short of our expectations” last quarter.
Since 2022, more than 800,000 tech workers have been laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts.
The surge in pink slips started in 2023, when companies that had gone on hiring sprees during the COVID-19 pandemic began to cut back. From January to April this year, U.S. tech employers announced 85,411 job cuts, up 33% from the same period last year, according to global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Groupon said in the filing that the decision to shift toward an AI-based company is to “better deliver on our mission, serving both customers and merchants.”
The company said the layoffs will cost it as much as $13 million, but save it more than $20 million per year.
This announcement comes as many e-commerce companies are shifting their business models to AI to reduce costs by automating many roles.
Artificial intelligence has also triggered fierce competition for top talent and is also fueling tens of thousands of layoffs this year. The result is that the class divide is widening in Silicon Valley as a tiny group of employees are landing unprecedented packages for AI skills, while many others struggle to find work.
The have-nots are doing everything that used to guarantee great jobs — refreshing resumes, optimizing LinkedIn profiles and doing interviews — but companies are much more picky these days. The tech jobless are rethinking their lives. Some are taking pay cuts, while others are leaving tech. Some are going back to study or launch startups. Some have retired.
Groupon shares, which have fallen 27% over the last 12 months, slipped 1% on Thursday to $21.20.
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC has filed renewal applications with the Federal Communications Commission “under protest” after an order mandating a years-early review of the network’s eight television station licenses.
The criticism was part of the network’s applications for the FCC review, which were filed ahead of a deadline Thursday. In an objection to the early renewal, Disney’s New York station WABC called the FCC order “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional” and said it was “legally indefensible.”
“The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades,” the station wrote in its filing. “And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The order has no legitimate purpose.”
The licenses for the eight ABC-owned TV stations, including KABC in Los Angeles, were originally scheduled for renewal between 2028 and 2031.
The FCC order came shortly after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow” days before a gunman tried to breach the White House Correspondents’ Assn. gala last month that President Trump attended.
Trump has frequently threatened to have TV station licenses pulled when he is unhappy with their coverage, but the order is the first time the government has acted on his wishes, sparking anger from free speech advocates. The FCC has said the order is part of an investigation into whether Disney’s diversity and inclusion policies violate federal law and the agency’s rules against “unlawful discrimination.”
In its response, WABC said the “only plausible reason” to issue the order was to “punish the station for speech the government does not like.”
“The ultimate injury here is not to the station or its parent company. It is to the public,” WABC wrote. “When a broadcaster must weigh regulatory retaliation before making editorial decisions, the public loses access to journalism that is free from government influence.”
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement Thursday that Disney filed its applications to renew its broadcast licenses only after the company was told its previous answers were “disingenuous, deficient and improper.”
“Contrary to Disney’s claim that the FCC called in their broadcast licenses for early renewal for no reason, the record shows something very different,” Carr said. “Broadcast licensees have a unique obligation to operate in the public interest. The FCC will follow the facts and law wherever they may lead.”
FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, the panel’s only Democrat who has backed Disney in its fight, cheered the Burbank media and entertainment company’s filing, saying in a post on X that she was “glad to see them expose the FCC’s actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”
Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.
Andrew here. Warning: If you bet on prediction markets about things you could know about from your work, it may be insider trading. That’s the lesson from new charges against an employee of Google.
Also, Jamie Dimon is thinking about spending $20 billion on acquisitions; we go through some possible targets. And take our quiz about the U.F.C. fight scheduled to take place at the White House.
Gaming prediction markets
In the public’s view, prediction markets are a way to bet on the N.B.A. playoffs, the Texas Senate race or what Costco executives will say on their next earnings call.
They’re also often seen as a hive of insider trading, a view reinforced by charges filed on Wednesday against a Google employee who made more than $1 million on Polymarket. The case raises more questions about how these platforms are policed — and who should do the policing.
What happened: The Google employee, Michele Spagnuolo (who used the handle AlphaRaccoon), was accused of betting on what people were searching for on Google — wagers he was sure to win because he had access to internal search data.
“Spagnuolo correctly predicted virtually all of the outcomes on these positions,” the Commodity Futures Trading Commission wrote in its complaint.
A Google representative said in a statement that using confidential information for making these kinds of bets was “a serious breach of our policies.”
Spagnuolo isn’t the only person charged with insider trading on Polymarket. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan last month accused Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. Special Forces soldier, of betting on the capture of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, an operation he participated in.
Insider trading is an increasing problem for prediction markets. Polymarket has faced significant scrutiny because its unregulated offshore platform has long made it easy to bet anonymously. (Kalshi, which is regulated in the U.S., has also suffered from insider trading.)
Polymarket has started clamping down on that practice, according to The Information — though some longtime users have chafed at those efforts. “Polymarket will go down the drain if they make KYC mandatory,” one user wrote on the company’s Discord discussion forum, referring to “know your customer” practices.
What are policymakers doing? Critics have accused the C.F.T.C., the primary American regulator of prediction markets, of failing to adequately police the industry. (Mike Selig, the commission’s chairman, told ABC News that his agency actively patrolled for wrongdoing.)
Some lawmakers are seeking to crack down on insider trading, including Representative James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who leads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and several bipartisan groups of senators.
Why it matters: Prediction markets have become big businesses. (Kalshi was most recently valued at $22 billion.) But a growing perception that they’re rife with cheating could threaten their popularity.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to fund U.S. drone companies. Shares in Unusual Machines, a drone start-up in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor and advisory board member, are soaring in premarket trading after The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported on the potential investments. (The Times hasn’t independently confirmed the report.) The deals, aimed at bolstering domestic production, are still in the negotiation stage — equity stakes are a possibility — as the Pentagon vets the companies, The Journal adds.
Investors brace for Thursday’s inflation data. The Personal Consumption Expenditures report for April, which will be closely watched by the Fed, is expected to show on Thursday that headline inflation hit a three-year high of 3.9 percent. The wartime energy spike is a big culprit, and that’s likely to tie the Fed’s hands on interest rates. Lisa Cook, a Fed governor whom President Trump has tried to fire, is the latest policymaker to say that there’s even a rate increase in the cards.
Jensen Huang reportedly agrees to join the board of a Chinese university. Huang, the Nvidia C.E.O., is expected to be the latest U.S. business leader to join the advisory board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, The Financial Times reports. Tim Cook, Apple’s departing C.E.O., is the chairman, and Michael Dell and Elon Musk are members. (Nvidia is trying to jump-start business in China as the Washington-Beijing trade war continues.) Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator, quickly seized on the Huang news, calling it “a massive scandal!!!!” on social media, and a national security risk.
What might Dimon buy?
Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, is sitting on a pile of cash and says he’s open to a deal. He even put a number on it: up to $20 billion.
While that’s not a big sum relative to the bank’s assets, it got us thinking: Where could JPMorgan, whose last major acquisition was First Republic during the 2023 regional-banking crisis, go fishing for a company to buy? Brian O’Keefe asked Mike Mayo, a banking analyst at Wells Fargo.
Here are three possibilities:
Wealth management. Driven by solid margins and lucrative high-net-worth customers, this area of finance has experienced an M.&A. boom in recent years. (The First Republic deal already bolstered JPMorgan’s wealth-advisory ranks.) Such a move would tick a lot of boxes, Mayo said, adding, “It could be a high-end private bank, it could be kind of a mass-affluent brokerage firm, it could be wealth advisory.”
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Mary Erdoes, who runs JPMorgan’s wealth management division, told analysts in February that her unit had reviewed 25 potential deals last year and passed on all of them.
Payments. JPMorgan has invested heavily in new payment platforms, including in JPM Coin, a digital token it has tested with Coinbase and Mastercard. The bank handles between $5 trillion and $10 trillion in transactions daily, Mayo said. “There could be more opportunities to enhance the efficiency, the effectiveness, the timeliness or the geographic reach in the payments area,” he added.
Digital banking. Dimon recently singled out Revolut, the British banking app that is plotting expansion into the U.S., as an emerging competitive threat. “To the extent that an acquisition could help JPMorgan become the next Revolut outside the United States, that would seem to be attractive,” Mayo noted.
There are some big asterisks to consider. Because of its size, JPMorgan would most likely be barred from buying another U.S. lender on antitrust grounds. For that reason, Mayo thinks that a deal, if there is one, would probably happen abroad.
Dimon himself is being coy. The bank may have amassed ample capital for acquisitions, but “it’s not burning a hole in our pocket at all,” Dimon said on Wednesday at an investor conference. “If it sits there for a while, no problem,” he added.
Dimon did not suggest any potential targets on Wednesday.
Here are some guesses:
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Aberdeen Group, Invesco or Julius Baer in wealth management?
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Revolut is too big, but how about Wise or Toast in payments?
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Or what about Monzo or Bunq, fintech banks that have grown rapidly in Europe?
Meta will charge for its chatbot
Meta will begin charging customers for access to its A.I.-powered chatbot, a big change for a company best known for its free products — and the latest sign that even deep-pocketed companies are wrestling with the enormous cost of artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, we looked at how companies were reining in the costs of consuming A.I., including by switching to cheaper models. Meta’s move shows that the companies supplying A.I. models are also reckoning with ballooning costs, and seeking revenue to make up for those losses.
Meta is spending a fortune on A.I. Last month the company increased its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to as high as $145 billion, and Meta’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, said it would spend at least $600 billion on A.I. infrastructure in the next few years.
Some investors have looked skeptically on that plan. The company’s stock is down 2.3 percent this year.
Meta will use paid subscriptions to offset some of its A.I. investment. The basic tier of the chatbot, Meta One Plus, will be $7.99 per month. A premium version, Meta One Premium, will cost $19.99. From Bloomberg, which reported the subscription news earlier:
Meta has long argued that its A.I. investments are already paying off in the form of highly targeted and efficient advertising, which is improved thanks to A.I. models. But the company is also looking for other ways to recoup its A.I. spending, and consumer chatbot subscriptions have become popular with several other A.I. competitors, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI. Both rivals offer similarly priced subscription tiers.
The company has sought to expand its subscription business, testing plans for WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. It has also tried to cut costs in other corners of its business. This month, Meta laid off 10 percent of its employee base, about 8,000 workers.
Investors, eager to see revenue gains from A.I., cheered Meta’s subscription-chatbot plan. The company’s stock price was up 3.7 percent at the market close on Wednesday.
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Elsewhere, shares in the software maker Snowflake are soaring in premarket trading on Thursday after it reported strong quarterly results that suggested that A.I. agents weren’t clobbering its core subscription business. Salesforce’s analyst call on Wednesday, however, renewed fears that this sector was still vulnerable to A.I. disruption.
Quiz: U.F.C. on the South Lawn
This question comes from a recent Times article. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)
President Trump is getting ready to celebrate his 80th birthday — and America’s 250th — with an evening of mixed martial arts. Preparations are underway to host Ultimate Fighting Championship matches in an octagon on the White House’s South Lawn on June 14. Construction of the temporary arena, along with a 90-foot-tall arch known as “The Claw,” featuring LED lights and audio equipment, began this week.
U.F.C. plans to spend around $60 million on the event, said Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of TKO Group Holdings, U.F.C.’s parent company, on a recent earnings call. (He added that U.F.C. would lose about $30 million on the event but that it would be “an investment for the long term.”)
The expenses include about $700,000 to repair the lawn after the fight, Dana White, the U.F.C. president and chief executive, told Sports Business Journal.
How many people will the temporary arena hold for the U.F.C. event at the White House?
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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“SpaceX-Tesla Merger Is ‘Only a Matter of When,’ Early Investor Says” (Bloomberg)
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Shares in the European food-delivery company Delivery Hero are down sharply on Thursday after Uber, which is pursuing a takeover bid for the company, raised its stake to nearly 37 percent. (WSJ)
Politics, policy and regulation
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The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA over soaring World Cup ticket prices. (WSJ)
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Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said he would impose a 100 percent tax on payouts to state residents from the $1.8 billion fund tied to the Justice Department’s settlement with President Trump. (Politico)
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