The tariff apocalypse has not been canceled
Last week, President Donald Trump declared a series of tariffs that pitted the United States against the rest of the world. Big companies stayed nervously silent; small ones panicked. The stock market plunged. And surely worst of all, Switch 2 preorders were delayed. Then, the same day the largest tariffs went into effect, Trump hit the brakes with a “90-day pause.” But it’s only sort of a pause — and not on everything. Taxes on items from around the world remain higher than they were a week ago. And an escalating trade war with China has no end in sight.
Here’s roughly what’s happened. Trump announced a 10 percent base tax on goods from nearly every country on the planet, plus even higher tariffs — sometimes reaching 50 percent — on many of America’s most important trading partners. (These joined existing tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, among other things.) The base rate went into effect over the weekend, as Trump declared that despite other countries’ attempts to negotiate, he wasn’t backing down. China retaliated with its own tariffs, so Trump promised an extra 50 percent hike on US taxes on Chinese goods, bringing the number to a staggering 104 percent. As prom …