By The Daily Wire (World News) | Created at 2025-04-03 15:00:10 | Updated at 2025-04-05 02:31:03
1 day ago
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged countries to think twice before retaliating after President Donald Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs on nations across the globe on Wednesday.
Trump is hitting nearly every country in the world with what the White House is calling “reciprocal tariffs,” including an additional 34% tariff on China, a 20% tariff on the European Union, and a 46% tariff on Vietnam. Bessent told Fox News host Bret Baier on Wednesday, “My advice to every country right now is do not retaliate.”
“Sit back, take it in. Let’s see how it goes,” Bessent added. “Because if you retaliate, there will be escalation. If you don’t retaliate, this is the high-water mark.”
Following Trump’s Wednesday announcement, the European Union and China signaled they would hit U.S. exports with retaliatory tariffs. E.U. ambassadors are set to meet on Thursday to discuss countermeasures, The Washington Post reported. China has also promised retaliation, but the details of what those measures could be remain unknown as of Thursday morning.
“We love soybeans, but we can get them from Brazil; we do not need to get them from the United States,” said a senior European Commission official. “We like Harley-Davidsons, but we also like Moto Guzzi or we can buy Yamaha, right?”
Stocks tumbled Thursday morning following Trump’s rollout of the tariffs. The S&P 500 is on track for its worst day since September 2022, dropping 4%, CNBC reported. The Dow Jones was also down 4%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 5%.
Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” appear to be based on the United States’ trade deficit divided by imports, not based on other countries’ tariffs on U.S. goods, as first pointed out by anonymous X account @orthonormalist.
“While these new tariff measures have been framed as ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, it turns out the policy is actually one of surplus targeting,” Jones Trading Chief Marketing Strategist Mike O’Rourke said, according to CNN. “There does not appear to have been any tariffs used in the calculation of the rate. The Trump administration is specifically targeting nations with large trade surpluses with the United States relative to their exports to the United States.”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai maintained that the Trump administration “literally calculated tariff and non tariff barriers.”
