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    FirstFT: Fallout from Trump tariffs deepens as nations race to offer concessions

    This article is an on-site version of our FirstFT newsletter. Subscribers can sign up to our Asia, Europe/Africa or Americas edition to get the newsletter delivered every weekday morning. Explore all of our newsletters hereGood morning and welcome back following a day of carnage on global markets. We’ll bring you the latest on the latest on the impact of the Trump tariffs. And here’s what else we’re covering: South Korea’s president removed What ‘geoeconomics’ can teach us US troops prepare for Arctic warfareAnd the Orient Express’s first makeover in four decadesA global stock market sell-off, triggered by Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, deepened today, with falls in Asia and Europe presaging further falls in the US when Wall Street opens. Here’s what you need to know:The fallout so far. The tariffs wiped out about $2.5tn of market value on Wall Street yesterday, with technology stocks, banks and consumer goods companies suffering the biggest falls on the worst day for US shares in nearly five years. Brent crude slumped amid fears of a global economic slowdown and on the back of an unexpected announcement from the Opec+ countries that they would increase production from next month. Havens such as government bonds and gold benefited from the “flight to safety”. Shorter-dated bonds, which move with interest rate expectations, were particular beneficiaries. We saw the largest moves in two- and three-year yields, which move in the opposite direction to prices, since August 2024. Longer-term inflation expectations have been more stable.“There has been a massive flight to quality into Treasuries,” said Matthew Scott, head of core fixed-income and multi-asset trading at AllianceBernstein.What does the Federal Reserve do next? The bond price moves suggest investors are expecting a burst of inflation. Fed chair Jay Powell, who is speaking at an event later today on the economic outlook for the US, is facing a fiendishly difficult trade-off between rising prices and weakening growth. Scarred by the inflation surge that followed the end of the Covid-19 lockdowns, the central bank is anxious to prove it takes its inflation-fighting mandate seriously.The next few days will see many countries rushing to placate Washington with concessions. The universal 10 per cent import duty kicks in tomorrow and higher “reciprocal” tariffs from Wednesday. Here’s more analysis on the fallout:For more on the impact of Trump’s trade war, sign up for our Trade Secrets newsletter if you’re a premium subscriber, or upgrade your subscription here. Here’s what else we’re keeping tabs on today:Economic data: The government’s monthly employment data report is expected to confirm hiring slowed last month. Brazil’s statistics agency the IGP-DI price inflation index which is expected to confirm price rises slowed in Latin America’s biggest economy last month.Federal Reserve: Board governor Michael Barr will appear at an AI and banking conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco while Christopher Waller will participate in a discussion in New York on payments. TikTok: A deadline forcing the sale of the hugely popular social media app to non-Chinese owners comes into force tomorrow. Trump suggested yesterday he could cut tariffs if China allows ByteDance to divest the app.How well did you keep up with the news this week? Take our quiz.Five more top stories1. The director of the US National Security Agency was fired yesterday, according to Democratic lawmakers, as President Donald Trump extended his purge of America’s security establishment. The dismissal of Timothy Haugh came just hours after Trump sacked a number of national security officials following claims by a far-right activist of disloyalty to the president’s “Make America Great Again” agenda. Here’s more on the sackings. 2. South Korea’s president Yoon Suk Yeol has been removed from office four months after his shortlived attempt to impose martial law sparked a prolonged political crisis. The country’s Constitutional Court upheld Yoon’s impeachment, ending his presidency less than three years into his five-year term.3. BP chair Helge Lund has announced plans to step down “most likely during 2026” after a bruising tenure in which the oil major tried to pivot away from fossil fuels only to reverse course this year. Tom Wilson looks back at the highs and lows of Lund’s tenure. 3. PwC China plans to spin off its Dark Lab cyber security arm in a private buyout deal as the Big Four firm seeks to improve liquidity and navigate the financial fallout from its audit of failed Chinese property developer Evergrande. Here’s how much the deal could generate.4. Meta and the US Federal Trade Commission are set to face off in federal court later this month in the first big test of whether the new Trump-appointed antitrust regulator will continue to crack down on Big Tech. Mark Zuckerberg has met the president in recent days in an apparent last-minute lobbying attempt to avoid a court showdown.From the MagazineA group of US Marines are debriefed after training in the Arctic More

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    El-Erian says U.S. recession risks are now ‘uncomfortably high’

    Allianz’s Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian on Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s swathe of so-called reciprocal tariffs could have a significant effect on the global economy.
    He told CNBC the risk of a U.S. recession “has become uncomfortably high.”
    El-Erian also warned markets were underestimating the impact of the tariffs on inflation, saying the U.S. would be lucky to see a single rate cut from the Federal Reserve this year.

    Mohamed Aly El-Erian, chief economic advisor for Allianz SE. 
    Bloomberg | Getty Images

    President Donald Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession, Allianz’s Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday.
    He added that Trump’s swathe of so-called reciprocal tariffs could have a significant effect on the global economy.

    “You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
    “I don’t think [a U.S. recession] is inevitable because the structure of the economy is so strong, but the risk has become uncomfortably high.”
    Trump’s tariffs are being rolled out just as signs of weakness are starting to show in the American economy. Last month, fund managers, strategists and analysts told CNBC that they saw a slowdown on the horizon, with the risk of a recession rising to a six-month high.
    El-Erian said he believed the U.S. economy would expand by between 1% and 1.5% this year, noting that this represented a “significant change in the growth outlook” when compared with the IMF’s projection of 2.7% U.S. growth made earlier this year.
    “If we get close to 1%, we get close to what’s known as ‘stall speed,'” he said. “The economy isn’t going fast enough to allow for the sort of resource reallocations that you need. So once you get closer to one, which I hope we don’t, the recession risk will go up significantly.”

    Aside from warning about the state of the U.S. economy as tariffs come into play, El-Erian also said that markets were underestimating the inflation impact of Trump’s aggressive trade policies.  
    He further warned that markets were underestimating the inflation impact of the tariffs regime.
    “The first reaction has been concerns about growth. We haven’t had two other reactions yet: what will happen to growth in other countries, and that makes a question mark on whether the dollar weakness will continue, and then what does the [Federal Reserve] do?” he questioned.

    Last week, the latest U.S. data showed that core inflation rose more than expected, with the core personal consumption expenditures index — the Fed’s key inflation gauge — notching its biggest monthly gain in over a year.
    “I think if we’re lucky we’ll get one rate cut, not four, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we get none,” El-Erian added.
    “If it’s a normal Fed — and I say this qualification with a lot of emphasis, because this has not been a normal Fed — we would unlikely to get even one rate cut.”
    Markets are currently pricing in four rate cuts from the Fed over the course of the year, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tracker. At its most recent meeting in March, the central bank held its key rate steady in a range between 4.25% to 4.5%, with officials cutting their U.S. growth forecast but saying they still saw two rate cuts through 2025.

    ‘If the U.S. slows down, the rest of the world will slow down more’

    In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s reciprocal tariffs announcement, European currencies logged significant gains against the U.S. dollar, with the euro and the British pound touching on six-month highs against the greenback.
    El-Erian nevertheless said he did not expect to see long-term dollar weakness.
    “The market has reacted to lower U.S. growth, lower interest rates, lower capital flows to the US, and that’s why we’ve seen the dollar index depreciate. I think that’s round one,” he said. “People are going to realize that if the U.S. slows down, the rest of the world will slow down more than the U.S. So I don’t believe we’re going to continue to see dollar weakness.”
    Ultimately, El-Erian said, economists were divided on what huge import duties would mean for the American and global economies.
    “While there’s, I think, complete consensus on the pain [caused by tariffs] in the short term, there’s disagreement on the gain in the long term,” he told CNBC. “Can you make a case that this is pain now for gain later? Yes. Can you make it with conviction? No.”
    — CNBC’s Jeff Cox and Steve Liesman contributed to this report. More

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    Trump’s sweeping tariffs ignite $2.5tn rout on Wall Street

    $75 per monthComplete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.What’s included Global news & analysisExpert opinionFT App on Android & iOSFT Edit appFirstFT: the day’s biggest stories20+ curated newslettersFollow topics & set alerts with myFTFT Videos & Podcasts20 monthly gift articles to shareLex: FT’s flagship investment column15+ Premium newsletters by leading expertsFT Digital Edition: our digitised print edition More

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    Global stock rout intensifies

    Global stocks extended their losses on Friday after China retaliated against Donald Trump’s tariff blitz, as investors took fright at the prospect of a full-blown global trade war.Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.The Stoxx Europe 600 index was down 4.4 per cent in the early afternoon, with losses accelerating after Beijing’s announcement, pulling the Europe-wide benchmark into correction territory. Germany’s Dax was down 4.1 per cent. The FTSE 100 was down 3.9 per cent.Futures markets pointed to further steep declines on Wall Street after Thursday’s rout, when the S&P 500 suffered its biggest one-day drop since 2020. S&P futures were down 2.7 per cent ahead of the New York open, with futures for the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite down 2.8 per cent, paring earlier falls.Oil prices continued to fall, with Brent crude down 6.2 per cent at $65.76 a barrel.“The market is doing one thing: pricing in a global recession,” said Deutsche Bank analyst George Saravelos.Government bond yields tumbled as investors sought haven assets, with the 10-year US Treasury falling 0.16 percentage points to 3.89 per cent. Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell will deliver a speech in the US morning. Futures markets are pricing in four quarter-point interest rate cuts from the Fed by the end of this year, up from the three that were expected before Wednesday’s tariffs announcement.The dollar was down 0.1 per cent against a basket of peers. More

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    Swiss cheesemakers should hope there’s no ‘Liberation Day 2’

    Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Funny how stuff comes together sometimes.Last month, mainFT’s Valentina Romei and our very own Robin covered how a January surge in US gold imports by traders trying to get ahead of tariffs had temporarily broken the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model, leading it to indicate a looming recession. The culprit behind the leap in “finished metal shape” (aka gold bar) imports was Switzerland.And if you’re a Swiss cheese exporter with a large US clientele, that could end up mattering a lot, depending on the future whims of the White House.The reason is simple — again, in a stupid kind of way. We’ve dwelled a lot upon how inane the Trump Administration’s “discounted”, “reciprocal” tariff calculation is.If you’ve somehow missed it, it’s broadly (with some exceptions, including a blanket 20 per cent levy on EU goods): take America’s 2024 trade balance with a country, divide it by the amount the US imported from that country, divide the result by two, and make that the tariff percentage. If the percentage is below 10, make it 10. Sorry to the UK.It’s a crude mechanism, and one that produces particularly wild results for smaller economies that often simply sell the US things the US can’t make or grow itself.But it’s easy to get caught in the stupefying simplicity of the calculation, and ignore the stupefying simplicity of the data pool. Justifying the tariffs, the USTR release says:The failure of trade deficits to balance has many causes, with tariff and non-tariff economic fundamentals as major contributors. Regulatory barriers to American products, environmental reviews, differences in consumption tax rates, compliance hurdles and costs, currency manipulation and undervaluation all serve to deter American goods and keep trade balances distorted. As a result, U.S. consumer demand has been siphoned out of the U.S. economy into the global economy, leading to the closure of more than 90,000 American factories since 1997, and a decline in our manufacturing workforce of more than 6.6 million jobs, more than a third from its peak.So how better to assess that epochal, multi-decade economic shift than by extrapolating an entire policy from only 2024 data?Back to Switzerland. Exports of goods deemed Swiss to the US face a reciprocal tariff of 31 per cent — markedly higher than that flat 20-per-cent EU rate — reflecting $64bn of Swiss exports to the US and a trade surplus of $39bn against the Americans in 2024. Now, the GDPNow-distorting influx of gold fell within 2025, but the US also saw less extreme “finished metal shapes” jumps last year that lined up with rises in imports from Switzerland. In short, the overall Swiss 2024 numbers also seem to be unusually swollen by the yellow stuff.So how different might Wednesday’s tariff announcement have been if “Liberation Day” had been this time last year, based on 2023’s figures, or in another recent-ish year? Well, quite a lot:Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.It’s a tough break for Swiss cheesemakers and clockmakers, who now face a bigger tariff barrier than they might have got in 2024 or 2023. But could things get worse? Let’s imagine “Liberation Day” becomes an annual occurrence — a federal stock-market holiday, even! — and on April 2, journalists gather in the Oval Office as the President presents updated tariffs based on the same formula. This would probably create all kinds of odd situations around countries trying to game their trade stats, but for now let’s hand-wave that away. Over enough time, this could mean the long-term average tariffs paid are “fairer”, insofar as the (crude, unfair) tariffs would at least not be biased by any potential oddities of a single year, 2024.Of course, rates could still end up biased by a series of other potential oddities from other individual years. That potential volatility would force exporters to the US to plan for a future in which the price of their goods fluctuates wildly each year based on their country’s annual trade balance. Not great for planning.But there is no clear plan for “Liberation Day” to be an annual occurrence, of course. These tariffs are supposedly going to be the baseline for the rest of the Trump Administration; or until President Trump changes his mind; or possibly forever, depending on how confident you feel about the strength of US institutions. In other words, 2024’s trade data might end up mattering for a long time. Who might then appear be victim of timing, and who might have just got lucky?Well, here are all the countries for whom FT Alphaville could get enough sequential data to roughly answer that question. Relatively bigger 2024 column compare with previous years = more hard-done-by. Relatively smaller = a good year to be tariffed on:Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.(Note that in this and the subsequent diagrams we’ve shown EU countries as disaggregated, ie they get a variable 2020–23 implied rate and only receive the blanket 20 per treatment for 2024.)Sequencing them by the spread between 2023’s implied rate and 2024’s actual rate, things look tough for Vanuatu and Laos (and we’re left wondering what happened in Comoros last year):Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.We will concede that the Y-axis labels above are unforgivably small, but we refuse to change that because 2023 is of course equally flawed as a single year to look at.A mildly better way to assess fairness is to compare the applied tariffs to some kind of average. So now that we understand the system, let’s compare the announced rates with an theoretical average over five years (even though that will capture some pandemic-era jankiness):Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.Vanuatu . . . ouch. Assuming its trade relationship normalises to recent trends this year, Vanuatuan exporters should really hope Liberation Day does become a regular thing. Swiss cheesemakers may feel differently. As a reminder, here’s how the US/Swiss trade relationship shifted in January:Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.Managing roughly half an ordinary year’s worth of exports to the US in a single month means — if Liberation Day does return — that Switzerland could be on track for a horrible tariff recalculation.If so — and unless there’s a monumental reversal over the rest of this year — then 2 April 2026 would be a bad day in the Swiss dairy.Further reading:— O dirang, Donald? (FTAV)— Reciprocal tariffs: You won’t believe how they came up with the numbers (FTAV)— The stupidest chart you’ll see today (FTAV) — Academic citation malpractice, reciprocal tariffs edition (FTAV) More

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    What the dollar’s bad day shows

    Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.This article is an on-site version of our Unhedged newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every weekday. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium here, or explore all FT newslettersGood morning. You probably don’t need Unhedged to tell you that it was a very nasty day on Wall Street yesterday. The S&P 500 fell 5 per cent, with banks and tech taking an absolute whipping while hidey-hole sectors such as staples and healthcare rose. Treasury yields fell. A classic flight from risk, with some surprising wrinkles, such as a decline in gold. Below, we look at another move that caught us off-guard: the dollar’s big drop. Send us your thoughts: [email protected] and [email protected]. The dollar’s bad dayUS tariffs, the consensus story goes, push the dollar up. Tariffs lower demand for imports, resulting in fewer dollars getting swapped for foreign currencies. That decreases demand for euros, yen and the rest, and raises the dollar’s relative value.On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced the highest US tariffs in almost a century, and the dollar weakened thereafter. Yes, weird things happen on days like yesterday, when markets have to quickly rearrange the financial furniture after a major shock. But the 1.6 per cent tumble in the dollar index — the biggest one-day fall since 2022 — looks like the continuation, or acceleration, of a trend that began early this year. It’s important to understand what’s going on here: There are a many possible explanations — and a few may be working in concert. Markets may know there is more news coming on tariffs, and soon. Retaliation from the US’s trading partners is on the way. Trump may back off when pressed, as he has in the past. From Calvin Tse, head of US strategy and economics at BNP Paribas:Our framework for foreign exchange [markets] going into today was that for new tariffs to have an impact, there were both size and duration elements to consider. Specifically, for the USD to materially rally, tariffs would have to be much larger than expected and also stay in place for a significant period. [Only] the first prerequisite has been fulfilled.The second possibility is that the dollar’s decline is a result of falling Treasury yields relative to other sovereign bonds. The opportunity for arbitrage means that currencies follow rate differentials closely. But this can’t be the whole story, as James Athey of Marlborough Group pointed out to us. Look, on the far right in the chart below, how the dollar-euro exchange rate and the differential between the two-year bonds of the US and Germany came apart yesterday, with the dollar falling further:  Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.Another possibility is that global investors, who have been very overweight US risk assets, have decided to cut back. The dollar selling that that requires could be outweighing foreign flows into Treasuries. This sort of rebalancing, Athey says, is “a huge (and I mean huge) risk because of the extent of foreign ownership of US assets, for equities in particular — foreigners own 18 per cent of the US equity market, and it was 7 per cent in 2000”. This makes intuitive sense on a day when many Wall Street economists increased their odds of a US recession this year.Historically, however, there have been few if any cases of the US falling into a recession from which the rest of the world emerges unhurt. Trump’s tariffs will hurt the US economy; they will almost certainly hurt other economies more. And during times of global trouble, investors have tended to flock to the dollar and dollar assets as a safe haven (this is half of “the dollar smile”; the other half being when the dollar rises in boom times). If risks to the world economy rise, and yet the dollar weakens, is the dollar’s special status eroding? From Thierry Wizman at Macquarie Group: We know that this role of the USD as a ‘haven’ was already attenuating in the first quarter of 2025. That’s because the weekly gains of the dollar . . . had become more negatively correlated with weekly stock market performance . . . That’s a pattern we attributed to the associated loss of American exceptionalism under the push for a more ‘autarkic’ trade regime for the US.Not everyone agrees with Wizman that a shift away from the dollar was already under way. “There is no evidence that money is leaving the US en masse,” said Michael Howell of CrossBorder Capital. “The [capital] flows data does not support that takeaway; at the end of February, there was no evidence of shifts out of the dollar. [Recent] moves in the dollar index are not sufficient to suggest there is a secular change away from the US.” Unhedged will reserve judgment on the end of dollar exceptionalism. But there is another, less grand explanation for what is happening. Differences in the fiscal impulse in the US and other countries are clearly contributing to relative dollar weakness. The US is coming off years of economic outperformance, powered in part by massive fiscal stimulus. Under Trump and the Republicans, the amount of fiscal stimulus is likely to be lower. Meanwhile, China and Europe look set to crank up their spending.We still have a lot to learn about the economic impacts of Wednesday’s tariffs. When Trump first shocked the world with tariffs back in 2018, we were living in a very different world, Manoj Pradhan of Talking Heads Macro points out:At the time, there were two years to a presidential election, and there was every chance at that point that there would be six more years of a Trump administration . . . there was no inflation, less concern about deficits or debt sustainability, or questions around whether the Fed would continue to be on hold. This time around, we have levels of inflation that are worrisome [and] Trump has razor thin majorities in the House. Whatever retaliation you could have could impact growth, and there is a possibility that the midterms could really change things. We’re in a new world. The dollar won’t be the last thing to surprise us. (Reiter and Armstrong)One good readThis seems like a violation of privacy but we are definitely buying the book.FT Unhedged podcastCan’t get enough of Unhedged? Listen to our new podcast, for a 15-minute dive into the latest markets news and financial headlines, twice a week. Catch up on past editions of the newsletter here.Recommended newsletters for youDue Diligence — Top stories from the world of corporate finance. Sign up hereFree Lunch — Your guide to the global economic policy debate. Sign up here More

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    Divided EU scrambles for a response to Trump’s tariffs

    This article is an on-site version of our Europe Express newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every weekday and fortnightly on Saturday morning. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium here, or explore all FT newslettersGood morning. News to start: Nato’s European members must agree a “joint road map [and] timetable” with the US to shift the burden of defending the continent, Finland’s defence minister told the Financial Times, to avert a unilateral withdrawal by the Trump administration that Russia could exploit.Below, I have more from the minister on how to sidestep Hungary’s pro-Russian spoiler tactics. But before that, our trade maestro explains Brussels’ stuttering response to Donald Trump’s tariff onslaught.Have a liberating weekend. Delayed reaction The US has whacked the EU three times with tariffs in the space of a month. Yet Brussels’ first response is still being thrashed out by nervous member states, writes Andy Bounds.Context: US President Donald Trump levied tariffs of 20 per cent on almost all EU exports on Wednesday. That is on top of 25 per cent of sectoral levies on steel, aluminium and cars.The European Commission has said it wouldretaliate on up to €26bn worth of US goods for the tariffs on steel and aluminium. But the US is hitting €350mn plus of EU products — and Brussels has yet to come up with a response for the rest of them.France, Italy and Ireland want bourbon whiskey taken off the steel retaliatory list, on the grounds that Trump threatened to escalate with 200 per cent levies on wine and other alcohol.Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, met EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič yesterday to plead his case. “Putting a sanction on whiskey means provoking a reaction on the alcohol that we export, wines in particular. And since we export much more alcohol than we import, it would be a form of self-harm,” Tajani said.He also wanted motorbikes taken off the list, fearing for Moto Guzzi and Ducati, as well as jewellery, precious stones and another 30 products.Tajani instead wants talks to eliminate all tariffs between the two sides. Šefčovič will have an online call with his American counterpart tomorrow, but talks have so far yielded no progress. One issue is that Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary he talks to, appears to have little sway with Trump. Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, called the shots, said one EU diplomat. “It seems that Peter Navarro is the architect of these policies. But he will not be the one to negotiate,” said the diplomat.European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen yesterday promised the EU was preparing to respond to the tariffs in kind, but she was “ready to negotiate to remove any remaining barriers to transatlantic trade”. Officials however insist the conversation must be two-way, with Washington dropping some of its non-tariff barriers. The EU will send its revised list of retaliation measures to member states on Monday, with a vote planned for next week. The tariffs would then be passed into law on April 15, but only apply a month later.Stéphane Séjourné, the EU’s industry commissioner, said he would meet industry leaders on April 10 to take the temperature.“The objective will be to assess the consequences for the sectors, discuss the format of the countermeasures and the means of supporting our companies,” his office said.Chart du jour: Flying awayAnother effect of the Trump tariffs: The cost of air freight to the US immediately surged, as businesses rushed to import products before the measures hit.Bypassing BudapestBrussels must be legally “innovative” to prevent Hungary from blocking support to Ukraine or easing pressure on Russia, Finland’s defence minister has said.Context: Hungary, the EU’s most pro-Russian member state, has repeatedly delayed or weakened sanctions against Moscow and vetoed military support for Kyiv. It has also threatened to release some €190bn of frozen Russian state assets in July, when the sanctions immobilising them come up for renewal.“All the [EU] nations are stepping forward with their own national budgets [to support Ukraine]. There are good signs. But Hungary is a problem,” Antti Häkkänen told the FT. “The European Commission has to find a legal and financial instruments for that.”“I know the European Commission’s lawyers, they can be really innovative. So now is the time to use all the ideas,” he added. “How to find different kinds of funds, back ups for loans or something like that, that we can continue even stronger Ukrainian support.”Häkkänen’s fears are shared by many EU capitals worried about Hungary blocking the sanctions extension — which requires unanimity — or preventing new financial support packages for Kyiv from being agreed.“If there’s a bad peace [in Ukraine] and the sanctions are being lifted off too quickly, Russia will get the energy incomes and re-arm themselves faster,” Häkkänen said. “And that’s a problem for the whole of Europe . . . what we have to now use is EU funding to aid Ukraine’s military.”What to watch today European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council president António Costa attend the EU-Central Asia summit in Samarkand.Now read theseRecommended newsletters for you Free Lunch — Your guide to the global economic policy debate. Sign up hereThe State of Britain — Peter Foster’s guide to the UK’s economy, trade and investment in a changing world. Sign up hereAre you enjoying Europe Express? Sign up here to have it delivered straight to your inbox every workday at 7am CET and on Saturdays at noon CET. Do tell us what you think, we love to hear from you: [email protected]. Keep up with the latest European stories @FT Europe More