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      Tesla’s Falling Profit May Pressure Elon Musk to Return to Day Job

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      The carmaker is expected to report a decline in quarterly earnings after Tesla’s brand suffered because of its chief executive’s role in the Trump administration.Tesla is expected to report on Tuesday that its profits fell in the first three months of the year, which could increase the pressure on Elon Musk, the automaker’s chief executive, to curtail his work for President Trump and spend more time managing the company.Wall Street analysts expect Tesla to say its net profit declined slightly from $1.1 billion in the first quarter of 2024.Tesla sales have been slumping because of intense competition from Chinese carmakers like BYD, a lack of new models and Mr. Musk’s support of far-right causes, which has turned away some liberals and centrists from buying Tesla vehicles.Tesla remains the most valuable automaker in the world as measured by its stock price, but its shares have lost about half their value since mid-December as investors have grown more pessimistic about the company’s prospects and concerned about Mr. Musk’s role in the Trump administration.Tesla has steadily lost market share to Chinese carmakers and more established automakers, like General Motors, Volkswagen and Hyundai, that have been offering a growing selection of electric vehicles.Mr. Musk’s company once hoped to sell 20 million vehicles a year by the end of the decade, twice as many as Toyota. But sales have been sliding after climbing to 1.8 million in 2023. Last year, the company sold 1.7 million cars, and its global sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter of 2025 from a year earlier.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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      In Trump’s America, There Are No Rules, Only Access

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      Daniel JurmanOne of the most dramatic policy reversals in U.S. economic history happened this month. In the span of just a few days, President Trump announced sweeping tariff increases, panicking global markets, and then partially backed down — all without meaningful consultation with Congress or much evidence his administration used a rational process to arrive at the numbers.Economists, who don’t often agree on much, greeted the plan with near unanimous criticism and a fair degree of derision. Few if any political analysts could articulate a coherent rationale for why threatening to launch a trade war on most nations on earth would make strategic sense.Yet in a way it does, because the real story may not be about trade. Looked at in a different way, it’s about power.In principle, it is not up to the president to decide unilaterally whether to impose tariffs, or on which countries to impose them. The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution clearly vests this authority in Congress. However, Mr. Trump made use of his powers to restrict trade under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to regulate trade during economic emergencies. The president effectively declared that the executive branch could bypass Congress’s constitutional authority.Financial markets seemed to grasp this. Unlike past global crises, this episode did not send investors fleeing into the dollar’s safety. Quite the opposite: The dollar dropped sharply when the tariffs were announced and continued to fall even after the administration reversed course. This suggests that investors are anxious about much more than just the economic damage from protectionist policies. They’re worried about the United States no longer being a safe place to hold their assets. They have good reason to be concerned.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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      Brace Yourself. Trump’s Trade War With China Will Get Even Uglier.

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      Voters elected Donald Trump in part because they wanted a fighter. But increasingly it seems that in international trade, he’s good at shaking his fist for the cameras but utterly outclassed when he steps into the boxing ring.Indeed, Trump may be more dangerous to his own side of a trade war than to the other guy.Even after Trump’s climb-down — declaring a 90-day pause on many of the “Liberation Day” levies that sent the stock market reeling — America’s tariff rates remain the highest in more than 90 years. They amount to an enormous tax hike on consumers, with researchers previously estimating that they might add something like $1,700 in costs per year to a middle-income American family. They’re a reason many economists fear that the United States is slipping into a recession.The most heated trade war is with China, and it’s there that I fear Trump has particularly miscalculated. He seems to be waiting for President Xi Jinping to cry uncle and demand relief, but that’s unlikely; instead, it may be the United States that will be most desperate to end the trade conflict.China does have serious internal economic challenges, including widespread underemployment and a deflationary loop with no end in sight. The trade war could cost China millions of jobs, and that raises some risks of political instability.Yet it’s also true that China has prepared for this trade war. I’m guessing some Chinese factories are already printing “Made in Vietnam” labels and preparing to ship goods through third countries. And China will fight with weapons that go far beyond tariffs.China buys agricultural products and airplanes from America, and it can almost certainly get what it needs elsewhere. But where is the United States going to get rare-earth minerals, essential for American industry and the military-industrial base?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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      IMF Warns Trump Tariffs Will Weaken Economy and Increase Inflation

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      Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned in a speech that protectionism erodes productivity.The world economy is expected to grow slower this year and experience higher inflation than previously anticipated, according to new forecasts to be released by the International Monetary Fund that will show the global fallout of the U.S. trade war.The growth projections, to be released early next week, will offer the clearest indication to date of the damage that President Trump’s economic policies are having on global output. Since taking office in January, Mr. Trump has imposed a wide range of tariffs on most of America’s trading partners, while ratcheting levies even higher on imports from China, Canada and Mexico.“Our new growth projections will include notable markdowns, but not recession,” Kristalina Georgieva, the I.M.F. managing director, said on Thursday in a speech ahead of the spring meetings of the I.M.F. and the World Bank. “We will also see markups to the inflation forecasts for some countries.”Ms. Georgieva’s comments added to a growing chorus of top economic officials, including the heads of the Federal Reserve and the World Bank, who have sounded alarms this week about the potential harm that Mr. Trump’s policies could cause.The European Central Bank on Thursday lowered interest rates, saying that “the outlook for growth has deteriorated owing to rising trade tensions.” Central bankers, finance ministers and other policymakers will gather in Washington next week as they continue to grapple with how to respond.Ms. Georgieva was careful in her criticism of the Trump administration’s policies, which have created widespread uncertainty for businesses and are disrupting international supply chains. But she made clear her concerns about the costs of protectionism.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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      W.T.O. Projects Sharp Pullback in Global Trade, Citing Trump’s Tariffs

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      The World Trade Organization forecast on Wednesday that President Trump’s trade policies would shave nearly three percentage points off the volume of global trade in goods this year, as tariffs raise the price of U.S. imports, invite retaliation and slow economic activity.At the start of the year, the W.T.O. expected goods trading to continue growing roughly in line with the global economy, expanding by 2.7 percent. Now it expects it to contract by 0.2 percent instead. That’s a sharp drop from last year, when goods trade grew by 2.9 percent.Mr. Trump has introduced a suite of tariffs, including a 10 percent tariff on most of the world, a minimum tariff of 145 percent on U.S. imports from China, levies on goods from Canada and Mexico and sector-specific tariffs targeting steel, aluminum and vehicles. The Trump administration says this will help bring manufacturing back to the United States and boost the economy, though many economists have predicted the tariffs will instead be a drag on economic activity.The W.T.O., a Geneva-based group that monitors patterns in global trade and coordinates trade negotiations and disputes among its members, said that the estimates were based on the tariff situation as of Monday, and that trade could shrink further “if the situation deteriorates.”The tariffs will have the biggest impact on trade in North America, the group said, where it expects exports will plummet 12.6 percent and imports will drop 9.6 percent in 2025. Asia will be the next most affected, but Asia and Europe will still post modest growth in both exports and imports, the group forecasts.The group said global trade was particularly at risk from the potential return of Mr. Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs.” The president paused those tariffs last week for 90 days, and the Trump administration is now trying to negotiate trade deals with individual countries.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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      Amazon Sellers Struggle with Trump’s Tariff Plans

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      When President Trump announced tariffs this month on goods from all over the world, Jing and Eddie Levine, who sell party supplies on Amazon, were on a flight home to Chicago after visiting suppliers in Asia.Amazon was the center of their life. They met at a conference for Amazon sellers in 2016 and had their first kiss at another Amazon conference two years later. They moved in together and grew their business, Treasures Gifted. When they married in 2022, they threw an Amazon-themed wedding, with guests assigned Amazon product numbers instead of table numbers.The Levines tried to make sense of the news. The giant poster that Mr. Trump pointed to during a Rose Garden ceremony on April 2 showed that China would be hit with large tariffs, but so would every country they had just visited — and almost every country on the planet, for that matter.“Thank God the Wi-Fi on the plane was not bad this time,” Mr. Levine said, “because I would have had a heart attack.”The balloons, plates and decorations that the Levines import are just a speck in the trillions of dollars in goods that swirl around the globe. A week after Mr. Trump announced his so-called reciprocal tariffs, he pulled them back for most countries for at least 90 days, while sending tariffs on China even higher.Countries or major companies may be able to lobby the president for a break, as he seemed to give Apple and other electronics makers over the weekend. But the best the Levines of the world can do is wait for news updates and hope their plans haven’t been shredded by Mr. Trump’s vision for unraveling decades of global trade. And like thousands of other small-business owners who sell online, the Levines are struggling to adapt to an e-commerce system that let them tap into international markets but that is now on the verge of falling apart.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 Girds for Economic Stress of Trump’s Tariffs

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      The economy grew steadily from January through March, but U.S. tariffs pose a risk for China in the coming weeks and months.President Trump’s tariffs have been good for China’s economic growth. At least they were over the first three months of the year, as the country’s factories raced to ship exports ahead of the trade restrictions.China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported on Wednesday that the country’s gross domestic product grew 1.2 percent from the last three months of 2024. If that pace continues, the Chinese economy will expand at an annual rate of 4.9 percent.But whether China can maintain that growth is shrouded in uncertainty.Pinned down by tariffs that threaten to freeze trade with its biggest customer, China’s economy is facing one of its greatest challenges in years.Growth in the early months of this year was propelled by rapidly rising exports and the manufacturing investment and production necessary to support those exports. Sales of electric cars, household appliances, consumer electronics and furniture were also strong because of ever-widening government subsidies for buyers.Then on April 2, Mr. Trump started escalating tariffs, which reached an extraordinary 145 percent for more than half of China’s exports to the United States.Mr. Trump’s first two rounds of tariffs on Chinese goods, 10 percent in February and again in March, had little immediate effect on exports. China’s overall exports in March rose 12.4 percent in dollar terms from a year earlier, as some exporters appeared to rush shipments to docks before tariffs could go even higher.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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      Hong Kong Suspends Packages to the U.S., Wading Into the Trump Trade War

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      The move comes before President Trump’s planned imposition of new tariffs on small packages sent to the United States from Hong Kong and China.Wading into the trade war, Hong Kong said on Wednesday that its postal service will no longer send packages to the United States.It is the city’s first move in a spiraling tit-for-tat trade war between China and the United States that is reordering global shipping routes.President Trump this month ordered the closure of a loophole that allowed retailers to send clothes and goods from China and Hong Kong, a special administrative region, to the United States without having to pay tariffs. After that change takes effect on May 2, United States Customs and Border agents will begin to collect previously exempted tariffs on shipments worth less $800.Hongkong Post said it would immediately stop accepting surface postal items containing goods to the United States. It said it was taking the action in response to President Trump’s tariffs.“The U.S. is unreasonable, bullying and imposing tariffs abusively,” the postal service said in a statement posted to the Hong Kong government’s website.The postal service said it would contact senders who posted packages with goods that have not yet been shipped, to return the packages and refund their postage.“The public in Hong Kong should be prepared to pay exorbitant and unreasonable fees due to the U.S.’s unreasonable and bullying acts,” it said. More