Closing post
Time to wrap up….
Stocks are falling on Wall Street as last Friday’s rejection of Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs by the supreme court reverberates around global markets.
The main US share indices are solidly in the red, with the Dow Jones industrial average now down almost 850 points or 1.8% so far today.
Investors said Friday’s ruling that tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) were unlawful had created fresh uncertainty, with Trump retaliating with a new 15% global tariff.
The US president has declared that he can use tariffs in a “much more powerful and obnoxious way”, as the UK and the EU sought urgent clarity on the US trade deals they struck last summer.
Trump threatened to ramp up his global tariff war on Monday, after a supreme court ruling last week that he had overstepped his legal authority to impose his “liberation day” measures last year.
Keir Starmer’s spokesperson said he did not expect Trump’s new 15% global tariff – announced on Saturday – to affect the “majority” of a UK-US economic deal that was agreed last year.
However, it is still not clear if the new tariffs, collected from Tuesday, will be at the 10% rate on most goods agreed last May, the 15% rate, or customs default to pre-reciprocal day tariffs.
Faced with this uncertainty, the European Parliament decided today to pause the ratification process relating to the US trade deal, helping to push markets lower.
Following that move, Trump warned that:
Any Country that wants to “play games” with the ridiculous supreme court decision, especially those that have “Ripped Off” the U.S.A. for years, and even decades, will be met with a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to.
Economists said that countries such as China, India and Brazil would benefit from the new 15% global tariff, as it was lower than their previous levies under IEEPA,
The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency said it would deactivate all tariff codes associated with International Emergency Economic Powers Act-related orders as of Tuesday at midnight (5am UK time).
A Bank of England policymaker warned that US tariffs are “here to stay” and could lead to shockwaves across the economy for “many years”,
Here’s the latest:
Full story: Stock markets stumble as global trade faces more Trump tariff uncertainty
Stock markets stumbled on Monday as Donald Trump pushed ahead with fresh tariffs on the US’s trading partners despite a supreme court strike-down and growing opposition from domestic voters.
Uncertainty over the status of global trade deals spooked investors, trigging a drop in US shares prices including on the Dow Jones industrial average, which tumbled 1.4% in morning trading. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 also fell 0.9% and 1.1%, following losses for UK and European stock markets.
Shareholders were struggling to discern the next steps in Trump’s global trade war, after the US supreme court ruled on Friday that the president overstepped his legal authority by using emergency measures to impose tariffs on countries across the world last year.
But Trump went on to announce over the weekend that he would push ahead and impose temporary tariffs on US imports from all countries: first declaring a 10% rate, before hiking that figure to 15%, under a never-before-used section of the Trade Act of 1974.
