Donald Trump tariffs: President temporarily drops tariffs to 10pc for most countries, hits China with 125pc

President Donald Trump has dropped new tariff rates on imports from most US trade partners to 10 per cent for 90 days to allow trade negotiations with those countries. Mr Trump announced the pause overnight Wednesday, hours after goods from nearly 90 nations became subject to stiffer, so-called reciprocal tariffs imposed by the US. The president also said in a social media post that he was raising the tariffs imposed on imports from China to 125 per cent “effective immediately” due to the “lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets”. China, which is the US’s third-largest trading partner, earlier Wednesday said it would increase its tariff rate for imports from the US to 84 per cent. Mr Trump said “more than 75 Countries” contacted US officials to negotiate after he unveiled his new tariffs last week. Stock market indices rocketed sharply higher Wednesday on Mr Trump’s announcement, reversing four days of losses. The benchmark S&P 500 index leapt by 7 per cent, which puts it on track for its largest single-day gain in five years. When asked later about the reason for his decision, Mr Trump told reporters: “Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line.” “They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid,” Mr Trump said at the White House. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett claimed to reporters that Mr Trump had always intended to put the brakes on the wide-ranging tariffs the president announced last week. “This was his strategy all along,” Mr Bessent said at the White House, where officials, including him, had denied for days that the tariffs would be suspended. On April 2, Trump had said he would impose a baseline rate of 10 per cent for tariffs on imports from more than 180 countries. A subset of 90 countries’ imports would be subject to reciprocal tariffs that took effect Wednesday. Those enhanced levies ranged from a low of 11 per cent to a high of 50 per cent. Financial markets have been in turmoil since Mr Trump announced with plan, with US stock markets suffering four straight days of declines as of Tuesday. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer criticised Mr Trump on Wednesday,, saying the president “is feeling the heat from Democrats and across America about how bad these tariffs are”. “He is reeling, he is retreating, and that is a good thing,” said Mr Schumer. “This is government by chaos,” Mr Schumer said. “He keeps changing things from day to day. His advisers are fighting among themselves, calling each other names, and you cannot run a country with such chaos, with such unpredictability, with such lack of understanding of what’s going on in the world and the facts. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in a tweet, said that he and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sat with Mr Trump while he wrote out the announcement on Truth Social, “one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency”. “The world is ready to work with President Trump to fix global trade, and China has chosen the opposite direction,” Mr Lutnick wrote. CNBC