Flagship

Trump escalates China tariff threats

US President Donald Trump escalated trade tensions with China on Monday, while opening tariff negotiations with Japan and Israel. Trump issued Beijing an ultimatum to remove retaliatory duties or face an additional 50% tariff. He also said talks with China would be “terminated,” but that negotiations with other countries — which are racing to reach out to the White House — would move forward, reflecting Trump’s carrot-and-stick approach toward trading partners. While Vietnam and the European Union have offered to completely eliminate some duties, Trump’s trade adviser has criticized governments for “nontariff cheating”: Trump is “always willing to listen,” Peter Navarro wrote in the Financial Times, but foreign countries must also end the “barrage of non-tariff weapons [used] to strangle American exports.”

US markets swing wildly

US stocks whipsawed Monday as markets were rocked by US President Donald Trump’s threats of higher duties against China and rumors of a tariff reprieve. The volatility followed a historic selloff last week as recession fears ticked up; traders were so on edge Monday that a false social media post — saying Trump was considering a blanket pause on tariffs — caused stocks to briefly surge, with the S&P adding more than $2.5 trillion in value in a span of seven minutes, before it evaporated just as quickly. The wild swings “underscore just how badly investors want Trump to put a pause on his trade war,” CNN wrote. “The market is very sensitive,” one investor said. “Tenterhooks is an understatement.”

Wall Street titans slam tariff plan

Several of Wall Street’s biggest names criticized US President Donald Trump’s tariff policies, reflecting rising discontent among some of his supporters. Billionaire hedge fund manager and ardent Trump backer Bill Ackman called for a 90-day tariff delay and warned of a “self-induced, economic nuclear winter,” while JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said economic fragmentation from US allies “may be disastrous in the long run.” The divergence between Trump and top financiers — some of whom support tariffs in theory — was put in stark relief after White House officials dismissed market and recession concerns. “We believe that Wall Street and Main Street prosper and suffer together,” one market analyst wrote. “The Trump administration disagrees.”

Netanyahu offers trade concessions

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to eliminate his country’s trade deficit with the US and drop all trade barriers, after meeting with US President Donald Trump on Monday. Netanyahu was the first world leader to hold in-person talks with Trump about the new “Liberation Day” tariffs. Amid the overseas overtures, however, Netanyahu is under pressure at home over “Qatargate,” a scandal centering on allegations that his advisers were paid by a Qatari representative to promote the Gulf nation’s interests in the media. The Israeli leader is facing intense backlash over his attempt to fire the head of the country’s security agency that launched the Qatargate investigation. “We are a spoiled country in a process of accelerated deterioration,” a former Israeli intelligence officer said.

India relatively spared in stock bloodbath

While global markets were hammered by US President Donald Trump’s tariff rollout, India was relatively spared, as investors bet the country’s economy will weather the storm better than others. Indian stocks fell Monday, but not as much as equities in China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Europe. Investors see New Delhi as well positioned to navigate the trade uncertainty: It has ruled out retaliatory tariffs, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s warm relationship with Trump has raised hopes of striking a favorable deal. India could also benefit as companies look to shift production away from high-tariff Asian nations, analysts said. Apple plans to ship more iPhones to the US from India to offset high China tariffs, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Pakistan taps big name to boost crypto

Pakistan tapped Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao to serve on its newly formed Crypto Council, as the South Asian country hopes to revive its economy by luring foreign investors. Government officials said the move was part of a push to accelerate the country’s digital finance transformation: “We are sending a clear message… Pakistan is open for innovation.” Zhao served as Binance’s CEO until 2023, when he pleaded guilty to US money laundering charges, serving four months in prison. Pakistan is one of several economies, including El Salvador, the UAE, and Singapore, that have moved toward pro-crypto policies. El Salvador in 2021 became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, but it recently scaled back its embrace.

‘Efficiency’ goes global

The US’ aggressive cost-cutting effort has sparked domestic backlash, but other countries are also in pursuit of state “efficiency.” Vietnam is embarking on a massive restructuring to minimize bureaucracy that goes beyond US efforts shepherded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Nikkei reported, while politicians in India and Australia have heralded DOGE. But an over-emphasis on “efficiency” is a slippery slope that can erode democracy, two experts argued in Foreign Policy. Stemming from a global shift beginning in the 1960s, “efficiency became fetishized as the only goal of government,” they wrote. Those ideas “converged with the possibilities offered by technology to create a new hypercharged, technology-infused vision of utopia that has shaped the DOGE view of the world.”

Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, will join top global leaders at Semafor’s 2025 World Economy Summit, taking place April 23-25, 2025, in Washington, DC. As the first major gathering since the new US administration took office, the summit will feature on-the-record discussions with 100+ CEOs.

Bringing together leaders from both the public and private sectors — including congressional leaders and global finance ministers — the three-day summit will explore the forces shaping the global economy and geopolitics. Across 12 sessions, it will foster transformative, news-making conversations on how the world’s decision-makers are tackling economic growth in increasingly uncertain times.

April 23-25 | Washington, DC | Learn More

AI reasoning models’ deception

Artificial intelligence chatbots can be deceitful about how they think. A growing trend in AI research is “chain-of-thought” reasoning, in which chatbots talk users through how they reached a conclusion so as to help spot hallucinations and deception, and improve outputs: AIs are so complicated that no human can directly understand their reasoning. But Anthropic research found that AIs which had been fed a clue to a question — “like slipping a student a note saying ‘the answer is [A]’ before an exam” — would often not mention that clue in their chain-of-thought, suggesting the models are hiding their thinking from the user. With researchers increasingly predicting world-changing “superintelligent” AI this decade, less trustworthy reasoning models could be extremely dangerous.

The Moon’s sway over humanity

Two new books explore the Moon’s influence on the history of humanity. Our Moon by Rebecca Boyle notes the role of tides in shaping evolution, The New York Review of Books wrote: Organisms “from corals and sea urchins to bean sprouts and trees” have internal lunar clocks, and the first animals to move onto land likely did so in tidal pools. Lunar, edited by Matthew Shindell, is an atlas of the Moon’s surface, interspersed with essays on “everything from myth to movies.” It argues that ancient civilizations worshiped the Moon but also applied “rational, mathematical calculation,” using it to note when to hunt or plant: “Human measurement of time may have grown from charting the phases of the moon.”

Congrats to 100-year-old Mommy

Two Galápagos giant tortoises became parents at 100. Mommy, a resident of Philadelphia Zoo since 1932, laid 16 eggs, of which four hatched. It is the first successful hatching in the zoo’s 126-year history. The tennis ball-sized babies are Mommy’s first, but her equally ancient partner Abrazzo has children by an earlier relationship. Galápagos tortoises once numbered hundreds of thousands, but were hunted to near extinction: In the last half-century, though, conservation has helped them rebound to around 17,000. There are several species, so finding breeding matches for a given specimen can be tricky. The tortoises can live to 200, placing Mommy and Abrazzo “squarely in middle age,” The New York Times reported.

April 8:

• A Russian-US crew of three astronauts lifts off in Kazakhstan for its journey to the International Space Station.
• OMV, Unite Group, and Walgreens Boots Alliance report earnings.
• The final season of The Handmaid’s Tale premieres on Hulu.

A new exhibition seeks to bolster the legacy of Claude Monet’s stepdaughter, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, who was the impressionist master’s assistant, mentee, and constant companion on his famous plein air painting expeditions. Often clambering after him with canvases and brushes, Hoschedé-Monet was “the only one of his children … whose passion for painting mirrored his own,” the BBC wrote. While Hoschedé-Monet took her artistic cues from her stepfather, she eventually developed a style distinctly her own, and would offer him much-needed comfort as his eyesight failed later in life: “It was she who kept him alive for us,” one art dealer said. “Posterity must not forget her.”

President Donald Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency director is jettisoning executives and policies at breakneck speed, sparking chaos at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as his ultimate goal remains elusive even to Republicans, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller reported.

FHFA chief Bill Pulte’s shake-up of the firms risks elevating housing costs at an already precarious economic moment — while privatizing the firms, as some Republicans desire, carries its own risks.

“This is the beginning of the road for Fannie and Freddie,” Mueller wrote. “Where the road leads is less certain.”