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      Stocks Sink as Trump’s Tariff Threats Weigh on Confidence

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      Stocks in Japan tumbled nearly 4 percent as investors braced for a week of market turmoil caused by an expected announcement of more tariffs.Stocks in Asia tumbled Monday as investors braced for a week of market tumult caused by an expected announcement of more tariffs by President Trump on America’s biggest trading partners.Japan’s Nikkei 225 index fell nearly 4 percent in early trading. Stocks in South Korea and Taiwan were down more than 2 percent.Stocks in Hong Kong and mainland China were mostly unchanged, bolstered by a report signaling that China’s export-led industrial sector continues to expand despite Mr. Trump’s initial tariffs.Futures on the S&P 500, which allow investors to trade the benchmark index before exchanges reopen in New York in the morning, slumped 0.5 percent on Sunday evening. On Friday, the S&P 500 dropped 2 percent on concerns about inflation and weak consumer sentiment.Since taking office a little over two months ago, Mr. Trump has kept investors and companies guessing with his haphazard rollout of what he calls an “America First” trade policy.In some cases, Mr. Trump has imposed tariffs to make imports more expensive in industries like automobiles, arguing that the trade barriers will spur investment and innovation in the United States. He has also used tariffs, and their threat, to try to extract geopolitical concessions from countries. He has further unnerved investors by saying he does not care about the fallout of his actions on markets or American consumers, who will have to pay more for many goods if import prices rise.Over the weekend, Mr. Trump ramped up the pressure, threatening so-called secondary sanctions on Russia if it does not engage in talks to bring about a cessation of fighting in Ukraine. The tactic echoes similar sanctions concerning Venezuela. He said last week that any country buying Venezuelan oil could face another 25 percent tariff on its imports to the United States. The threats over the weekend add to tariffs of 25 percent on imported cars and some car parts set to be implemented this week, barring any last minute reprieve. That’s in addition to previously delayed tariffs on Mexico and Canada, as well as the potential for further retaliatory tariffs on other countries.Adding to investors’ angst is the scheduled release on Friday of the monthly report on the health of the U.S. jobs market. It could provide another reading of how the Trump administration’s policy pursuits are weighing on the economy.Keith Bradsher More

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      CoreWeave Scales Back Ambition for Its I.P.O.

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      The company, which originally expected its shares to be priced between $47 and $55, will ask for $40 a share in a sign of stock market uncertainty.When CoreWeave, the cloud computing company vying to become the first major artificial intelligence start-up to go public, filed paperwork for a public listing earlier this month, it was a mark of optimism in an otherwise rocky market for I.P.O.s.But now that optimism has faded as the New Jersey-based CoreWeave significantly reduced the size and value of its offering on Thursday. The company is now expected to price its shares at $40 when it begins trading on Friday, according to the company, down from recent estimates in filings that its shares would be priced at $47 to $55 a share.Initially expected to raise around $4 billion at a $35 billion valuation, the company seeks to raise $1.5 billion in its offering Friday and would be valued at $19 billion.The reduced offering is a sign of a slumping stock market clouded by uncertainty around inflation and President Trump’s tariffs. And it reflects broader concerns around the development of A.I. in a slowing economy, as stock in Nvidia, the prized chip maker that is an investor in and supplier for CoreWeave, has fallen 7 percent since Wednesday.“It has been a brutal time for markets in general,” said Samuel Kerr, the head equity capital market analyst at the financial insight firm Mergermarket. “It shows you that there is very little appetite to put forward this kind of risk transaction at the moment.”While CoreWeave will be the first major A.I. company to go public, it is not a true litmus test for A.I. offerings, which will fall to the industry’s start-up standard bearers like OpenAI and Anthropic, the makers of chatbots popular with millions of users.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’s Tariffs Have Sown Uncertainty. That Might Be the Point.

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      Since taking office, President Trump and his advisers have explained the president’s aggressive economic approach to tariffs with a litany of conflicting ideas. Other countries are “ripping off” America and need to be stopped. The United States is fighting a drug war with Canada, Mexico and China. Tariffs will help pay down the nation’s $36 trillion debt load.The messaging hodgepodge comes as the U.S. economy shows signs of strain in response to Mr. Trump’s steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China and as he prepares to enact “reciprocal” tariffs on imports from around the world on April 2.The tariffs have sowed uncertainty and dampened business investment and consumer sentiment while sending markets gyrating daily. They are also likely to prevent the Federal Reserve from cutting rates as policymakers wait to see exactly what measures Mr. Trump follows through with and how they affect the economy.But rather than trying to provide more coherence about their economic strategy, Mr. Trump and his advisers seem to be embracing the uncertainty of his approach as a feature, not a bug.“Absolutely, between now and April 2, there’ll be some uncertainty,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on CNBC this week amid questions about what investors are to make of Mr. Trump’s trade agenda.Mr. Trump, when asked whether he would give the business community more clarity about his overall approach, largely dismissed concerns that corporations needed predictability.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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      E.U. Hatches a Plan to Lure Investors Back to Europe

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      Each year, Europeans invest roughly $325 billion in companies and financial assets outside the region. Officials in Brussels say they have a plan to end that “capital flight.”America’s once highflying stock markets are stumbling, and their counterparts in Europe are faring much better. Shares in European companies have comfortably outperformed the S&P 500 in recent months, as President Trump’s trade war has prompted investors to revisit their assumptions. Officials in Brussels say that the rally could be even bigger.The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is set to introduce a proposal on Wednesday to tap trillions of euros parked in Europeans’ savings accounts as part of a strategy to incentivize investors to back Europe Inc.The draft plan has a second objective: encourage consolidation among European asset managers, a sector long overshadowed by Wall Street. It is part of a larger vision to shake up the region’s byzantine capital markets, a long discussed effort that has taken on new urgency since Mr. Trump won re-election.“It’s because of Trump, but also the need for more integration in so many sectors,” said Fabrizio Pagani, a partner at the investment bank Vitale and a former top economic adviser to the Italian government. “There is so much positive catch-up to do.”Advisers to the commission are calling on member states to slash what they call “unnecessary” red tape to ease the consolidation of the continent’s army of asset managers, which are vastly outgunned by U.S. giants such as BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity.They also want to see member states introduce tax breaks for investors and pension funds, especially those who put their money into European financial assets — not just stocks, but in bonds and venture funding for private companies. Another idea being floated is to create Europe-wide investment and savings plans to bolster retail investing in Europe.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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      Musk’s Tweet-Fueled Bubble May Be About to Burst

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      Elon Musk’s business empire may be starting to wobble.Over the past six weeks, the value of Tesla’s shares has plunged about 40 percent, wiping out virtually all they had gained after the 2024 election. This reversal reveals Mr. Musk’s soft underbelly: His fortune depends heavily on the inflated expectations of his rabid following. As those expectations deflate so will his power, demonstrating that financial markets are an underappreciated guardrail against both Mr. Musk’s and President Trump’s agendas.It is tempting to compare Mr. Musk to the true business titans of the past quarter century such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But those individuals created genuinely huge businesses that eclipse anything Mr. Musk has built by any possible metric. While Mr. Musk has built a car company from the ground up — no easy feat — his wealth is largely thanks to a financial cult, one in which legions of dazzled investor-followers have enabled him to launch an ever-growing list of disparate initiatives and provided immunity from critics who question his operational decision-making, his corporate governance, his obscene pay packages, and now his migration into the political sphere.The high-wire act goes something like this: Dream up a business so ambitious that any setback is trivial and every accomplishment heroic. Identify yourself as the manic genius behind this ambitious business in order to personally capitalize on outsize returns from excited investors. Enlist social media to cement your iconic status, keeping your believers so enthusiastic that their fervor beats back any skeptics who dare to bet against your ventures, even as you pitch more and more fantastical ideas. At this point you hit the flywheel: Other investors, searching for outsize returns, flock to the shares of your other companies, pushing their valuations ever higher, thus fortifying your wealth and burnishing your reputation as a business mastermind.If you’re lucky, this happens when investors are dreaming of alternatives to the poor returns available when interest rates are ridiculously low; magical thinking about the power of technology suppresses any worry about the risks of problems down the line; and retail markets are turning stock trading into something more akin to online gambling.Understanding this cult requires one to rethink what one knows about finance. Financial purists like to think of financial markets as neutral arbiters that merely record the value-creating activities of entrepreneurs. Financial pragmatists understand that prices need not always reflect value, as behavioral finance has demonstrated. But what if entrepreneurs can capitalize on these dynamics to manufacture fortunes and political power?This trick is precisely what Mr. Musk has mastered. His messianic status, which was birthed in the explosion of social media, created a powerful cycle of outsize returns on ventures that lead to investors providing him with more and cheaper capital to diversify his empire that, in turn, attracts yet more investors fearful of missing out. Skyrocketing Tesla shares have made fans and investors so devoted that all he has to do is mention a new ambition to goad them into buying even more. And the larger the stated ambition, the more wealth and power they hand him. So why not try for Mars? The final step in this process is to consolidate power in the political sphere to ensure that the outsize ambitions can be nourished forever. If Mr. Musk had played it well, his empire may have been impregnable.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’s Tariffs by Whim Keep Allies and Markets Off Balance

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      On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on Fox Business to reassure nervous allies and even more twitchy investors that the Trump administration was negotiating a deal to avoid tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and that the president is “gonna work something out with them.”“It’s not gonna be a pause” for Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs, he insisted. “None of that pause stuff.”On Thursday, the world got what the president characterized as more of that pause stuff.Mr. Trump’s announcement that he had a good conversation with Mexico’s president, and would delay most tariffs until April 2, was only the latest example of the punish-by-whim nature of the second Trump presidency. A few hours after the Mexico announcement, Canada got a break too, even as Mr. Trump on social media accused its departing prime minister, Justin Trudeau, of using “the Tariff problem” to “run again for Prime Minister.”“So much fun to watch!” he wrote.Indeed, it appears that Mr. Trump is having enormous fun turning tariffs on and off like tap water. But others are developing a case of Trump-induced whiplash, not least investors, who sent stock prices down again on Thursday amid the uncertainty over what Mr. Trump’s inconstancy means for the global economy. (A later rise in stock futures pointed to rosier expectations for Friday.)When the White House finally released the text of Mr. Trump’s orders on Thursday evening, it appeared that some of the tariffs — those covered in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated and celebrated in his first term — were indeed permanently suspended. Other tariffs were merely paused.Most everyone involved was confused, which may well have been the point.As Mr. Trump hands down tariff determinations and then pulls them back for a month or so, world leaders call to plead their case, a bit like vassal states appealing to a larger power. Chief executives put in calls as well, making it clear that Mr. Trump is the one you need to deal with if you are bringing in car parts from Canada or chips from 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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      Trump’s Tariffs Hit Stock Markets

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      Global leaders are retaliating and investors have sold off stocks in Asia and Europe.Nowhere to hide as a new wave of U.S. tariffs sinks global stock markets.Franck Robichon/EPA, via ShutterstockNot just tough talk President Trump wasn’t bluffing, after all.Global markets plunged on Tuesday after U.S. tariffs went into effect on roughly $1.5 trillion worth of imports from Canada, Mexico and China, with another, and even broader, wave set to kick in as soon as next week.China and Canada have already responded, with Beijing targeting the American heartland with sweeping levies on imported food and halting log and soybean shipments from select U.S. companies. Mexico is expected to retaliate, too.The escalation has global business leaders increasingly worried about what will come next, as economists warn that consumers and companies will soon see higher prices. Warren Buffett offered a reminder of what the global economy is facing. “Tariffs,” the billionaire investor said this week, “are an act of war, to some degree.”Here’s the latest:Stocks in much of Asia and Europe fell on Tuesday, after the S&P 500 yesterday suffered its worst one-day decline this year. U.S. stock futures were down slightly on Tuesday.Hit especially hard on Tuesday were the shares of European automakers, including Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler Truck. Levies could slam the sector, which is highly dependent on a complex cross-border supply chain.The CBOE volatility index, Wall Street’s so-called fear gauge popularly known as the VIX, jumped, posting its biggest one-day spike this year, according to Deutsche Bank.The sell-off also extended to cryptocurrencies (more on that below), and, in a new twist, the dollar.If global investors weren’t spooked before, they seem to be now. “The market finally took the Trump administration at its word, and the realization that the tariff talk wasn’t just a negotiating tactic is starting to sink in,” Chris Zaccarelli, an investment strategist for Northlight Asset Management, said in a research note yesterday evening.How long will the trade battle last? Analysts see reason for cautious optimism — at least on China. “We view Beijing’s responses as still strategic and restrained,” Xiangrong Yu, Citigroup’s chief China economist, said in a research note on Tuesday. He said a trade deal was still “plausible.”The Shanghai composite index closed slightly higher on Tuesday.Market watchers warn of deep repercussions should the trade war drag on. Trump seems to be digging in, telling reporters yesterday that there is “no room left for Mexico or for Canada.” A protracted fight could dent global growth and accelerate inflation, all of which could “hamstring the Fed,” Mark Haefele, the chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday.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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      Elon Musk Is Focused on DOGE. What About Tesla?

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      Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s main advisers, has not outlined a plan to reverse falling sales at the electric car company of which he is chief executive.Elon Musk’s role as President Trump’s cost-cutting czar and his immersion in right-wing politics appears to be diverting his attention from Tesla at a perilous moment for the electric car company.Tesla’s car sales fell 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25 percent. Mr. Musk has not addressed that underperformance, and he has offered no concrete plan to revive sales. He has also provided no details about a more affordable model Tesla says it will start producing this year. In the past, Mr. Musk spent months or years promoting vehicles before they appeared in showrooms.And he has spent much of his time since the election in Washington and at Mr. Trump’s home in Florida — far from Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its corporate headquarters and a factory, or the San Francisco Bay Area, where it has a factory and engineering offices.In the past decade or so, Tesla went from a struggling start-up to upending the global auto industry. The company sold millions of electric cars and generated huge profits, forcing established automakers to invest billions of dollars to catch up. Tesla’s success has been reflected in its soaring stock price, which helped make Mr. Musk the world’s richest person.But now, he seems to have lost interest in the grinding business of developing, producing and selling cars, investors and analysts say. That could have serious ramifications for his company and the auto industry, which employs millions of people worldwide.Even before he joined the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk’s running multiple companies had led investors and corporate governance experts to wonder whether he was spread too thin. Besides Tesla, Mr. Musk controls and runs SpaceX, whose rockets carry astronauts and satellites for NASA and others; X, the social media site; and xAI, which is developing artificial intelligence. And he wants to colonize Mars.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