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    Walmart Says Trump’s Tariffs Have Added Uncertainty to Its Outlook

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    The timing was a bit awkward.Walmart’s investor event — which happens every two years and aims to showcase the company’s strengths and strategy for growth — also happened to fall on the same day that U.S.-imposed tariffs went into effect worldwide and a trade war heated up.As the largest retailer in the United States, Walmart relies on suppliers from around the world. And for the Wall Street analysts who attended the event in Dallas on Wednesday, tariffs were top of mind.Doug McMillon, Walmart’s chief executive, acknowledged the uncertainty. In response to one of several questions from analysts about tariffs, he said: “There’s so many variables playing out in terms of what costs are going to be, where people source from. We’re going have to manage this as we always do, daily.”Or by the minute.As the event got underway on Wednesday, the United States had imposed worldwide tariffs, including a levy of 104 percent on Chinese goods, and China quickly retaliated with 84 percent tariffs on U.S. goods. Mr. McMillon, speaking just after Beijing’s additional tariffs went into effect, said the situation was “very fluid.” In fact, not long after Mr. McMillon’s question-and-answer session with analysts, President Trump said he was pausing his worldwide reciprocal tariffs for 90 days and raising the rate on China to 125 percent.During the session, Mr. McMillon emphasized that Walmart was well placed to cope with uncertainty, having navigated “the period after 9/11, the global financial crisis, a pandemic and more recently high inflation.” Walmart’s customer base includes a large number of lower-income shoppers, who have less capacity to absorb the higher prices that the tariffs could bring.John David Rainey, Walmart’s chief financial officer, emphasized that two-thirds of what Walmart sells in the United States is made, grown or assembled domestically; the figure includes groceries, which generally have lower margins. The other third of what Walmart sells comes from all over the world, especially from China and Mexico, he said.Mr. Rainey said the tariffs had made it harder for Walmart to predict its first-quarter operating income growth. “We’re one week into this new tariff environment, and we’re still working through what this means for us,” he said. “For the current quarter, the uncertainty and decline in consumer sentiment has led to a little more sales volatility week to week and, frankly, day to day.”Walmart reiterated expectations for first-quarter sales growth of about 3 to 4 percent and said its annual sales growth guidance remained unchanged, with customers still expected to migrate toward e-commerce and delivery, key parts of Walmart’s strategy. Walmart will report its first-quarter results on May 15. More

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    Lesotho Has Few Options to Counter 50% U.S. Tariffs

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    In Lesotho, the small southern African nation that is among the countries hardest hit by President Trump’s new tariffs, business owners were meeting on Wednesday to strategize their response.For a country with an economy worth just $2.1 billion, few options are on the table.Mr. Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Lesotho, owing to the trade deficit between the country of 2.3 million people and the United States. Only Saint Pierre, a sparsely populated French archipelago off the coast of Canada, was hit the same tariff increase.On Wednesday, Lesotho’s private sector was looking to the government for answers. The government, facing the prospect of huge job losses, was preparing to make its case to the White House.“There’s a lot of panic,” said Thabo Qhesi, a business analyst who attended the business owners’ meeting, held in Lesotho’s capital, Maseru. The most anxious people in the room, he said in a telephone interview, were those connected to Lesotho’s textile and apparel industries, which export about 70 percent of their products to the United States.“They have no option but to close down or relocate to the countries where it would be more profitable to them,” Mr. Qhesi said.Most of Lesotho’s garment factories are owned by Chinese and Taiwanese companies that set up shop to take advantage of preferential terms allowed under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade agreement with the United States.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

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    China Hits Back Again at Trump, Bringing New Tariffs on U.S. Goods to 84%

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    Beijing on Wednesday aimed the latest blow in the escalating trade war between the United States and Washington, with plans to raise new tariffs on all American imports by 84 percent within hours.China’s Ministry of Finance announced that it would match a 50 percent tariff on all imports from China that President Trump announced on Tuesday with its own 50 percent tariff. Last week, the two sides traded 34 percent tariffs on each other that are also taking effect now.The latest Chinese tariffs on U.S. goods are scheduled to take effect one minute into Thursday in China.China and the United States have now taken a series of steps in just one week that until very recently would have been almost unimaginable. For nearly half a century after the death of Mao Zedong, the two countries seemed on a course toward ever greater economic integration. Some experts even referred to the partnership of China and America as “Chimerica.”That partnership was occasionally cast in doubt during the trade war that Mr. Trump started in his first presidential term, but it survived. The two countries’ close trade ties have since gradually loosened. But their ties have been supplemented by a complex trading web that transfers Chinese components to countries like Vietnam and Mexico, where they are assembled into finished goods for shipment to the United States with little or no tariffs due.The pair of steep tariff increases by each side in the past week have now driven duties to a level that is likely to halt shipments of many products between the two countries, particularly if the tariffs endure more than a few weeks. Prohibitively high tariffs could ripple extensively through supply chains for many goods that rely on factories often in China but sometimes in the United States as well.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

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    U.S. Bond Sell-Off is Another Worrisome Echo of the Liz Truss Fiasco

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    The parallels between President Trump and Liz Truss, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, are growing starker. Ms. Truss triggered market turmoil in 2022 after she proposed sweeping tax cuts that she proposed to pay for with massive government borrowing. Ms. Truss was ultimately doomed by fears of a credit crisis after yields on British government bonds spiked.Now, yields on U.S. Treasuries are beginning to rise. On Wednesday, in the hours after Mr. Trump’s latest tariffs went into effect, including levies of more than 100 percent on China, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury rose to as high as 4.5 percent, up from around 3.9 percent a few days ago. The yield on a 30-year bond briefly traded above 5 percent.Yields are still generally lower than when Mr. Trump was inaugurated, but a sustained sell-off of Treasuries would erase the key difference between the global market response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs and Ms. Truss’s tax cuts. In the immediate aftermath of the president’s tariff announcement, bond yields actually drifted down, even as the stock market plummeted and dollar weakened. This partly reflected expectations for slowing growth, but also served as a reminder of the traditional status of the American bond market as a haven for investors.Now, that safe-haven status may be crumbling, according to some analysts. At the extreme, that could raise pressure on the Federal Reserve to intervene, which is what the Bank of England did in 2022 to shore up the British bond market.In Britain’s case, those dramatic events forced Ms. Truss to rescind her proposed tax cuts, and the market chaos subsided. But Ms. Truss’s credibility was destroyed, and she was forced to step down after 44 days in office. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has shown no sign that he plans to reverse the tariffs, and for now, there appear to be few political levers to force his hand. More

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    China Condemns American ‘Protectionism’

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    The Chinese government on Wednesday issued a lengthy denunciation of American trade policies, accusing the United States of years of protectionism and of violating the trade agreement the two sides had negotiated late in President Trump’s first term.The document was issued by Beijing’s cabinet information office several hours after Mr. Trump raised to 104 percent the extra tariffs on Chinese goods that he has imposed in his second term.The missive assailed the United States for preparing to impose additional 90 percent tariffs on May 2 on low-value parcels from China, which enter the United States with no customs inspection and no duties paid. The value of these so-called de minimis shipments has soared more than tenfold in recent years, exceeding $60 billion last year.There were a few unexpected conciliatory notes in the Chinese statement. “As two major countries at different stages of development with distinct economic systems, it is natural for China and the U.S. to have differences and frictions in their economic and trade cooperation,” it said.The report, issued by the State Council Information Office, criticized the United States for having considerably tightened export controls on the transfer to China of technologies with both civilian and military applications. The office suggested that this was a violation of the spirit of the so-called Phase One agreement reached in 2020. It said that China had abided by the pact, which also called for China to increase its purchases of American energy, agricultural products and manufactured goods, such as aircraft from Boeing, the American aerospace giant.“The Chinese side upheld the spirit of contract and endeavored to overcome multiple adverse factors, including the unexpected impact of the pandemic, subsequent supply chain disruptions, and global economic recession, to ensure implementation of the agreement,” the report said.China cited production delays by Boeing during the pandemic as reasons for not fulfilling that part of the pact. While Boeing has had delays, Chinese government-controlled airlines have refused to accept delivery of dozens of previously ordered planes for six years. At the same time, a heavily subsidized state-owned manufacturer, the Shanghai-based Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, is racing to make its own single-aisle passenger planes.The commentary praised de minimis shipments as giving greater choice to consumers and helping small businesses to compete. Large Chinese e-commerce sites like Shein and Temu have expanded their shipments from factories in China straight to American households.The document noted that China allows de minimis shipments of parcels through delivery services. But in practice, China allows a far narrower exemption from tariffs than the $800 under the U.S. de minimis rules, limiting the value of many exempted parcels to $27.The document also did not mention that Congress raised the American de minimis limit to $800 in 2016, from $200 previously, kicking off a huge surge in such shipments across the Pacific from China and fueling a boom for Chinese e-commerce companies. More

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    E.U. Officials Set to Vote Today on First Retaliatory Tariffs

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    The European Union plans to vote on Wednesday afternoon on its first retaliation measures in response to President Trump’s tariffs, moving closer to placing increased duties on a range of manufactured goods and farm products that would take effect in phases starting next week.The list up for consideration is a slightly trimmed down version of one that was announced in mid-March in response to Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. E.U. officials have spent recent weeks consulting with policymakers and industries from across the 27-nation bloc in an effort to minimize how much the countermeasures would harm Europeans.The final list is expected to exclude bourbon, for instance, after Mr. Trump threatened to place a 200 percent tariff on all European alcohol in response to its inclusion. That would have been a crushing blow for wine producers in France, Italy and Spain.“We are not in a business of going, let’s say, cent for cent, or tit for tat, or dollar for dollar,” Maros Sefcovic, the bloc’s trade commissioner, said this week.Since last month, the United States has introduced tariffs of 25 percent on steel, aluminum and cars, and broad 20 percent on everything else coming from Europe — and those broad-based tariffs took effect on Wednesday. European Union officials have said they would prefer to negotiate to get rid of those higher levies, and have even offered to cut tariffs to zero on cars and other industrial products if the United States does the same.But with serious negotiations slow to materialize, Europe is striking back in a staggered way. The retaliatory tariffs up for a vote on Wednesday would be a first step, in response only to steel and aluminum levies.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

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    China Censors Hashtags Mentioning ‘104%,’ the Size of Trump’s Tariffs

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    Chinese censors appeared to be carefully curating public discussion about the U.S. tariffs that took effect on Wednesday. They promoted criticism of the United States, while seemingly playing down the specifics of how President Trump’s move would effectively increase import taxes on Chinese goods to 104 percent.On Weibo, a popular social media platform, several hashtags that used the number 104 — such as “104 tariff rate” or “America to impose 104 percent tariff on Chinese goods” — returned an error message that said: “Sorry, the content of this topic is not displayed.”But other hashtags that focused more squarely on mocking the United States, or on touting China’s strengths, were allowed to trend — and in fact were explicitly initiated by state media. “America is fighting a trade war while begging for eggs” was one popular hashtag started by CCTV, China’s state broadcaster. “China does not provoke trouble but is never afraid of it” was another.State media outlets adopted a similarly swaggering tone in their coverage. Several opinion pieces in the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, declared that China had learned from years of trade frictions to diversify and shore up its economy. “In Chinese people’s genes, we never fear any risks, challenges, difficulties or contradictions, and can regard all kinds of external pressure as the driving force for our own progress,” one piece said.Other pieces did not directly reference the tariffs but still touted the strengths of the Chinese economy. A front-page article in the People’s Daily laid out steps that the government would take to promote employment for fresh graduates.Mr. Xi himself has not publicly addressed the new tariffs. But on Wednesday afternoon, Chinese state media published his first public remarks since the latest escalation in the trade war, saying that he had met with his innermost circle of top officials on Tuesday and Wednesday.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

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    Trump Maintains 104% China Tariffs as U.S. Officials Signal Openness to Talks

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    President Trump’s next round of punishing tariffs on some of America’s largest trading partners was set to go into effect just after midnight on Wednesday, including stiff new levies that will increase import taxes on Chinese goods by at least 104 percent.Mr. Trump acknowledged on Tuesday that his tariffs had been “somewhat explosive.” But throughout the day he continued to defend his approach, saying that it was encouraging countries with what he calls “unfair” trade practices to offer concessions.“We have a lot of countries coming in to make deals,” he said during remarks at the White House on Tuesday afternoon. At a dinner with Congressional Republicans in Washington later that evening, he said other countries wanted to make a deal with the United States but he was happy just collecting the revenue from tariffs, which he claimed would reach $2 billion a day.“I know what the hell I’m doing,” he said, adding that he would be announcing “a major tariff on pharmaceuticals” very shortly.The president and top administration officials signaled on Tuesday that the White House was ready to negotiate deals, saying that 70 governments had approached the United States to try to roll the levies back. Mr. Trump said officials would begin talks with Japan, South Korea and other nations.The president, whose punitive and successive tariffs on China have triggered a potentially economically damaging trade war, also said he was open to talking to Beijing about a deal.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