- In today’s CEO Daily: Shawn Tully on the U.S.’s use of non-tariff barriers.
- The big story: Musk under pressure to leave DOGE as Tesla becomes tainted with politics.
- The markets: The dollar and the S&P 500 are down but Asia looks OK.
- Analyst notes from Apollo on recession, Oxford Economics on tariffs, and Goldman Sachs on stocks.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. For weeks I’ve been digging into the tariff war reverberating around the globe and affecting virtually every industry there is. To me, a major mystery of the Trump tariff crusade is this: The “Liberation Day” reciprocal duties he’s threatening are completely disconnected from what other nations are charging the U.S. on our exports. In virtually all cases, Trump’s tariffs are multiple times larger. How does he justify this giant gulf? The president claims we’re getting “ripped off” not by excessive tariffs but blatant “non-tariff barriers” (NTBs), such as quotas and technical standards that systematically block our goods from foreign markets, while we naively open America to the “cheaters” who lock us out. But the data show a different story. When I dug in, it became clear that the U.S. is utilizing many of the strategies that we’ve slammed trading partners for enforcing. Here’s what leaders should know about the policies underlying this chaotic debate:
