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$99 for your first yearFT newspaper delivered Monday-Saturday, plus FT Digital Edition delivered to your device Monday-Saturday.What’s included Weekday Print EditionFT WeekendFT Digital EditionGlobal news & analysisExpert opinionSpecial featuresExclusive FT analysis More
$99 for your first yearFT newspaper delivered Monday-Saturday, plus FT Digital Edition delivered to your device Monday-Saturday.What’s included Weekday Print EditionFT WeekendFT Digital EditionGlobal news & analysisExpert opinionSpecial featuresExclusive FT analysis More
$99 for your first yearFT newspaper delivered Monday-Saturday, plus FT Digital Edition delivered to your device Monday-Saturday.What’s included Weekday Print EditionFT WeekendFT Digital EditionGlobal news & analysisExpert opinionSpecial featuresExclusive FT analysis More
General Motors, the largest producer of cars in Mexico, won’t provide details on how it would react if President Trump imposes 25 percent tariffs from the two countries.General Motors executives are closely tracking President Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, but the company is not yet making any major changes to its strategy in North America in response to the threatened tariffs.The automaker has pulled together an “extensive playbook” of possible options but won’t put them in place “until the world changes dramatically, and we see a permanent level of tariffs going forward,” the company’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, told reporters in a conference call on Monday evening.“I won’t go into the details exactly but we’ve been preparing for that and want to make sure that we are prudent and don’t overreact,” he added.Mr. Trump said last week that he planned to impose tariffs of 25 percent on goods from Canada and Mexico starting on Saturday, Feb. 1. If he followed through on those plans, the tariffs would deal a big blow to G.M. and other automakers that produce vehicles and components in those countries, and probably increase the prices of many vehicles sold in the United States.G.M. produced nearly 900,000 vehicles in Mexico in 2024, more than any other carmaker, and most of those were shipped to the United States. Among them are the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks, as well as the Chevrolet Equinox sport-utility vehicle — all top-sellers and big sources of profit for the company. It also produces some Silverados and electric delivery vans in Canada.G.M. said on Tuesday that it lost $3 billion in the final three months of 2024, stemming from a $4 billion noncash expense related to a restructuring of its joint venture operations in China. The company’s revenue in the quarter rose 11 percent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The president is increasingly threatening other countries with tariffs for issues that have little to do with trade.In his first week in office, President Trump tried to browbeat governments across the world into ending the flow of drugs into America, accepting planes full of deported migrants, halting wars and ceding territory to the United States.For all of them, he deployed a common threat: Countries that did not meet his demands would face stiff tariffs on products they send to American consumers.Mr. Trump has long wielded tariffs as a weapon to resolve trade concerns. But the president is now frequently using them to make gains on issues that have little to do with trade.It is a strategy rarely seen from other presidents, and never at this frequency. While Mr. Trump threatened governments like Mexico’s with tariffs over immigration issues in his first term, he now appears to be making such threats almost daily, including on Sunday, when he said Colombia would face tariffs after its government turned back planes carrying deported immigrants.“The willingness rhetorically to throw the kitchen sink and use the whole tool kit is trying to send the message to other countries beyond Colombia that they should comply and find ways to address these border concerns,” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products on Feb. 1 unless those countries did more to stop the flows of drugs and migrants into the United States. Previously, he threatened to punish Denmark with tariffs if its government would not cede Greenland to the United States and to impose levies on Russia if it would not end its war in Ukraine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldUS President Donald Trump has pushed India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to buy more American-made weapons, as he called for the countries to rebalance their trade relationship in a call late on Monday.Trump emphasised that India should be increasing its “procurement of American-made security equipment and moving towards a fair bilateral trading relationship”, according to a White House statement issued after the call between the leaders, which the US called “productive”.Trump and Modi cultivated a close relationship during the US president’s first term, and New Delhi has been a strategic partner in Washington’s efforts to counter an increasingly assertive Beijing.But Trump also called India a “very big abuser” on trade during his re-election campaign last year, and analysts pointed to areas of friction between the countries, such as their trade deficit, Indian imports of Russian oil and the flow of Indian immigrants to the US. “The bilateral relationship is very likely to remain a strong one under Trump 2.0, yet transactional, in which President Trump will also require some concessions from India,” said Rani Mullen, a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. The US is India’s second-largest trading partner, narrowly trailing China, and New Delhi recorded a $35bn trade surplus with Washington between January and November 2024, according to the latest data from India’s commerce ministry. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on Brics countries, a grouping of major emerging economies that includes India. In a social media post late on Monday, Modi called Trump a “dear friend” and said they were “committed to a mutually beneficial and trusted partnership” in several areas, including security. Trump later told reporters that Modi would visit the White House “probably in February”, which would make the Indian leader among the first foreign dignitaries to visit since the US president’s inauguration.Trump’s requests came as India, long the world’s largest arms importer, has been seeking to diversify its weapons suppliers beyond Russia. It has leaned on the US, along with other countries such as France, to close a gap in military technology and preparedness with regional rival China.Modi has also pushed India’s military to support domestic arms manufacturers, part of his ambition for the defence and aviation industries to help make the country a global manufacturing power. Modi has set a target of $35bn for domestic defence production by the end of the decade, up from nearly $20bn last year. New Delhi needs to upgrade its military capabilities if it is to match those of nuclear-armed neighbour China, according to analysts, including in fighter jets, submarines, tanks, helicopters and even assault rifles. While some domestic arms makers have such capabilities, India lacks critical knowhow for technologies such as military jet engines. Trump and Modi also discussed expanding security co-operation in the Indo-Pacific region and reiterated their commitment to the Quad — a strategic grouping that also includes Japan and Australia — according to the White House. India is set to host the group’s leaders this year.The call coincided with a visit by India’s foreign secretary Vikram Misri to Beijing on Tuesday, during which the countries agreed in principle to resume direct passenger flights for the first time in five years. The routes were initially suspended during the Covid pandemic, and remained so after deadly border clashes in 2020 soured relations. Trump said he and Modi also discussed immigration, a priority for the new US administration, adding that the Indian prime minister would “do what’s right” in terms of accepting the return of illegal Indian nationals from the US. Indians made up the third-largest group of unauthorised immigrants in the US in 2022 after Mexico and El Salvador, according to the Pew Research Center. More
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.We’ve already spent a lot of time gawping at the vanishing spread between Japanese and Chinese government bond yields, and its myriad implications. Well, here’s another fixed income spread that says something interesting about the global economy today. Or at least something interesting about how investors see the global economy today. Lo, the spread between India and China’s 10 year sovereign bond yields hit an 11-year high of 5.2 percentage points earlier this month, and remains near its highest ever levels.The recent ballooning is mostly due to Chinese yields grinding lower and lower. Indian yields have actually fallen as well lately, due to expectations for rate cuts from the Reserve Bank of India, the surging US dollar, and last year’s inclusion into JPMorgan’s influential emerging market bond indices.However, the economic outlook for India is lot more positive than it is for China. As a result, the inflation picture is also radically different, as Chetan Ahya, chief Asia economist at Morgan Stanley points out:The difference is probably due to investors’ differing expectations for the real GDP growth and inflation outlook for these two economies . . . Expectations for both growth and inflation in India are higher as compared to China. India’s inflation expectations are probably closer to 4-5% while investors are expecting persistent deflationary pressures for China.Trinh Nguyen, economist for emerging Asia at Natixis, adds that India has some tailwinds that China now lacks: It is easier to grow when you have population growth, and when you have a lower base — India is only a US $4tn economy [China is $18tn]. Meanwhile China is facing a quadruple D of hurdles: deflation, demographics, debt and decoupling [with the US].As a result, Indian bond yields have remained relatively high — the 10-year yield has dipped from above 7 per cent in the middle of 2024 to around 6.7 per cent right now — even as Chinese bond yields have puked hard. In fact, the 10-year Chinese government bond yield is now only a whisker above 1.5 per cent, a figurative fixed income market howl that there’s a danger that deflation becomes entrenched. In a sign of how serious the situation is for China, its 30-year yield fell below that of Japan’s last year, and China’s 10-year government bond yield is now only 0.4 percentage point higher than that of Japan.The United Nations predicts that India will remain the fastest growing major economy in the world, forecasting GDP growth of 6.6 per cent in 2025, even Chinese economic growth slows to 4.8 per cent.The whole India versus China thing seems to be becoming a bit of a narrative, with UBS recently releasing a 139-page tome that compares the two countries across a range of different macro and capital market metrics. Most notably, the report predicts that India could overtake China in MSCI’s equity weightings by as early as 2028.Of course, it wasn’t that long ago that people were just as bullish on China . . . More
