Asian markets fall as Trumps tariffs roil global trade

Asian markets plunged on Monday following last week’s two-day meltdown on Wall Street, and President Donald Trump said he won’t back down on the sweeping new tariffs he announced on April 2 that have roiled global trade.Countries are scrambling to figure out how to respond to the tariffs, with China and others retaliating quickly.Trump’s tariff blitz fulfilled a key campaign promise as he acted without Congress to redraw the rules of the international trading system.It was a move decades in the making for Trump, who has long denounced foreign trade deals as unfair to the US.The higher rates are set to be collected beginning Wednesday, ushering in a new era of economic uncertainty with no clear end in sight.Here’s the latest:Beijing struck a note of confidence on Monday even as markets in Hong Kong and Shanghai tumbled.“The sky won’t fall.

Faced with the indiscriminate punches of US taxes, we know what we are doing and we have tools at our disposal,” wrote The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece.China announced a slew of countermeasures on Friday evening aimed at Trump’s tariffs, including its own 34% tariffs on all goods from the US set to go in effect on Wednesday.The Australian dollar fell below 60 US cents on Monday for the first time since the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.The drop reflected concerns over the Chinese economy and market expectations for four interest rate cuts in Australia this calendar year, Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers said.“What our modeling shows is that we expect there to be big hits to American growth and Chinese growth and a spike in American inflation as well,” Chalmers said.“We expect more manageable impacts on the Australian economy, but we still do expect Australian GDP to take a hit and we expect there to be an impact on prices here as well,” he added.The Trump administration assigned Australia the minimum baseline 10% tariff on imports in the the United States.The US ...