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      China Rejects Trump Claim of Tariff Talks With Xi

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      President Trump said “we’re meeting with China” on tariffs, comments aimed at soothing jittery financial markets. But Chinese officials say no talks have taken place.President Trump, whose trade war with China has rattled financial markets and threatened to disrupt huge swaths of trade, suggested on Friday that he has been in touch with Xi Jinping, China’s president, even as officials in China insist that no negotiations are occurring.In an interview with Time, Mr. Trump said Mr. Xi had called him and asserted that his team was in active talks with the Chinese on a trade deal. Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Friday morning, the president reiterated that he had spoken with the Chinese president “numerous times,” but he refused to answer when pressed on whether any call had happened after he imposed the tariffs earlier this month.Mr. Trump’s comments appeared aimed at creating the impression of progress with China to soothe jittery financial markets, which have fallen amid signs that the world’s largest economies are not negotiating. The S&P 500 is down 10 percent since Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.But his claims of talks have been rejected by Chinese officials, who have repeatedly denied this week that they are actively negotiating with the United States.“China and the U.S. have not held consultations or negotiations on the issue of tariffs,” Guo Jiakun, the spokesman for the foreign ministry, said in a news conference on Friday. “The United States should not confuse the public.”On Thursday, He Yadong, a spokesman for China’s commerce ministry, had said that there were “no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States.”“Any claims about progress in China-U.S. economic and trade negotiations are baseless rumors without factual evidence,” he said.Asked in the Time interview if he would call Mr. Xi if the Chinese leader did not call first, Mr. Trump said no.“We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody,” the president said.Mr. Trump also said, without evidence, that he had “made 200 deals.” He added that he would finish and announce them in the next three to four weeks.With the two governments at an impasse, businesses that rely on sourcing products from China — varying from hardware stores to toymakers — have been thrown into turmoil. The triple-digit tariff rates have forced many to halt shipments entirely.Trump officials have argued that the status quo with China on trade is not sustainable. Mr. Trump has rapidly ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese products, from 54 percent on April 2 to 145 percent just one week later. The Chinese government has argued that the actions are unfair and closely matched his moves, raising its tariffs on American goods to 125 percent. More

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      12 States Sue Trump Over His Tariffs

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      A dozen states, most of them led by Democrats, sued President Trump over his tariffs on Wednesday, arguing that he has no power to “arbitrarily impose tariffs as he has done here.”Contending that only Congress has the power to legislate tariffs, the states are asking the court to block the Trump administration from enforcing what they said were unlawful tariffs.“These edicts reflect a national trade policy that now hinges on the president’s whims rather than the sound exercise of his lawful authority,” said the lawsuit, filed by the states’ attorneys general in the U.S. Court of International Trade.The states, including New York, Illinois and Oregon, are the latest parties to take the Trump administration to court over the tariffs. Their case comes after California filed its own lawsuit last week, in which Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state attorney general accused the administration of escalating a trade war that has caused “immediate and irreparable harm” to that state’s economy.Officials and businesses from Oregon, the lead plaintiff in the suit filed Wednesday, have also expressed concerns about the vulnerability of the state’s trade-dependent economy, as well as its sportswear industry, as a result of the tariffs.“When a president pushes an unlawful policy that drives up prices at the grocery store and spikes utility bills, we don’t have the luxury of standing by,” said Dan Rayfield, Oregon’s attorney general, in a statement. “These tariffs hit every corner of our lives — from the checkout line to the doctor’s office — and we have a responsibility to push back.”Asked about the latest lawsuit, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, called it a “witch hunt” by Democrats against Mr. Trump. “The Trump administration remains committed to using its full legal authority to confront the distinct national emergencies our country is currently facing,” he said, “both the scourge of illegal migration and fentanyl flows across our border and the exploding annual U.S. goods trade deficit.”The other states in the suit are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Vermont. All of the states have Democratic attorneys general, though Nevada and Vermont have Republican governors.Mr. Trump’s tariffs have shocked and upended the global trade industry. He set a 145 percent tariff on goods from China, 25 percent on Canada, and 10 percent on almost all imports from most other countries.The moves have drawn legal challenges from other entities as well, including two members of the Blackfeet Nation, who filed a federal lawsuit in Montana over the tariffs on Canada, saying they violated tribal treaty rights. Legal groups like the Liberty Justice Center and the New Civil Liberties Alliance have also sued. “I’m happy that Oregon and the other states are joining us in this fight,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, who is working on the Liberty Justice Center’s lawsuit. More

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      Tariffs on China Aren’t Likely to Rescue Battered U.S. P.P.E. Industry

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      The few domestic companies that still make protective gear for health care workers have clamored for federal intervention. But they worry President Trump’s trade war with China won’t help.Few domestic industries have been as devastated by the flood of cheap Chinese imports as manufacturers of face masks, exam gloves and other disposable medical gear that protects health care workers from infectious pathogens.The industry’s demise had calamitous consequences during the Covid pandemic, when Beijing halted exports and American hospital workers found themselves at the mercy of a deadly airborne virus that quickly filled the nation’s emergency rooms and morgues.But as President Trump unveiled his tariff regimen earlier this month, and Beijing retaliated with an 84 percent tax on American imports, the few remaining companies that make protective gear in the United States felt mostly unease.“I’m pretty freaked out,” said Lloyd Armbrust, the chief executive of Armbrust American, a pandemic-era startup that produces N95 respirator masks at a factory in Texas. “On one hand, this is the kind of medicine we need if we really are going to become independent of China. On the other hand, this is not responsible industrial policy.”The United States once dominated the field of personal protective equipment, or P.P.E. The virus-filtering N95 mask and the disposable nitrile glove are American inventions, but China now produces more than 90 percent of the medical gear worn by American health care workers.Despite bipartisan vows to end the nation’s dependency on foreign medical products — and to shore up the dozens of domestic manufacturers that sprung up during the pandemic — federal agencies and state governments have resumed their reliance on inexpensive Chinese imports. Earlier this year, when California purchased millions of N95 masks for those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires, it chose masks made in China.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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      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