President Donald Trump is accelerating his aggressive trade agenda with a series of new tariff threats targeting major US trading partners, including a new 25% tax threat against European Union imports.
The president has announced plans to impose an additional 10% tariff on Chinese imports, scheduled to take effect on March 4, while his 25% tariffs against Canada and Mexico are now expected to take effect April 2.
Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Rick Newman analyzes the president's far-reaching trade strategy.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here.
This post was written by Angel Smith
President Donald Trump isn't slowing down on tariff policy this morning announcing an additional potential 10% tariff on China that's set to go into effect on March 4th and that's along with the delayed 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Now, this coming after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on the European Union yesterday. Let's take a listen.
It'll be 25% generally speaking and that'll be on cars and all other things and European Union is a different case and Canada, different kind of case. They've really taken advantage of us in a different way.
Joining us now to break it all down is our very own Rick Newman and Rick, I'm curious how you're looking at this just in terms of how likely they are. I guess it's anyone's guess at this point and and how long we're going to be dealing with these types of threats coming out of Washington?
Oh, I think we're going to be dealing with these types of threats for the duration of Trump's presidency. Um, I I don't foresee a time when he's going to be ever completely satisfied with uh the way we do global trade. Um, you know, everybody's trying to figure out what to make of this. I mean, the obvious question is how much is bluster and threat and how much is reality. And to some extent, Trump seems to be making it up as he goes along. Um, you know, I I uh as part of uh trying to understand where this all might be going. I went back and looked at the whole timeline for Trump's trade war during his first presidential term and that was mostly in 2018 and 2019, leading uh right before COVID. And one unmistakable pattern there is there's a lot of threatening tariffs and then there's a lot of pulling back on tariffs. So some of them tend to go in place, but not all of them and I think that's what we're looking at here. So, um, you know, just for some perspective. I mean, Trump originally, when he was running for president last year, he said he wanted to put a 60% tariff on Chinese imports. And then the first thing he did was, well, he did put uh tariffs on Chinese imports, but it was only 10%. And now he's threatening another 10% and I think what he's indicating is is that he's not getting the results that he wants from the first threat of tariffs or the actual imposition, which is a decline in the fenntil shipments. So he's going to keep raising the pressure until he feels like he gets what he wants. Most analysts think that uh the threats on uh Canada and Mexico, those would really hit our economy hard, much more than the 10% on China that he's not going to do that, but that he wants something in exchange. But I mean, everybody who's following this is just guessing and I don't think Trump himself actually knows.
