Flagship

Market euphoria short-lived

US stocks tumbled Thursday as euphoria over President Donald Trump’s 90-day tariff pause faded amid continued uncertainty and his escalating trade war with China. The S&P 500 fell 3.5% and the dollar had its worst day since 2022 as the White House said tariffs on Beijing now total 145%. New data showing that inflation eased in March wasn’t enough to impress investors who “are sobering up and realizing that the US-China ‘food fight’ will probably get worse before it gets better,” one Wall Street analyst said. The selloff suggests that market volatility will persist, with the US’ effective tariff rate still at its highest level since at least 1934. “The coast is not all clear,” a trader said.

Trump stances on trade, China converge

US President Donald Trump’s decision to hike duties on China to 145% while giving other countries a tariff reprieve amounts to a sudden “radical decoupling” of the world’s two largest economies, the historian and economic analyst Adam Tooze wrote. The move reflects how “trade policy and anti-China policy have converged” in Trump’s White House, Tooze wrote, with the underlying logic being to “shake the world, flush out and isolate China.” US-China trade relations have shaped the global economy, and with the superpowers now playing a game of chicken, global investors are left wondering who will blink first, Semafor’s Rohan Goswami wrote. With neither side backing down, “we are approaching a monumental train wreck breakup,” an expert told The New York Times.

China’s advantages in trade war

The yuan hit an 18-year-low Thursday as China lets its currency weaken to help offset the impact of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Despite its domestic economic challenges, China could come out on top in the escalating trade conflict with the US, analysts said. Beijing possesses the advantage of scale that Washington does not, two Biden administration officials argued in Foreign Affairs: “Two facts can be true at the same time: that China is slowing economically and that it is becoming more formidable strategically.” Instead of suppressing China’s rise, Trump’s aggressive duties are sharpening Beijing’s “survival instinct,” a China economist wrote in the Financial Times, and pulling the country back to the economic fundamentals of growth and competition.

Shipments canceled, rerouted over tariffs

Global firms reliant on US-China trade have begun changing their business plans in response to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Amazon canceled orders for multiple Chinese-made products; Walmart is reportedly pushing Chinese suppliers to keep prices down; and Apple is said to have airlifted 600 tons of iPhones from India to the US to beat the tariffs. Many Chinese exporters that sell to the US through platforms like Amazon, Shein, and Temu are raising prices or canceling shipments altogether, while other suppliers are rerouting goods. “We are going through fire and water,” the head of a Chinese e-commerce association said. Uncertainty over Trump’s trade agenda looms over long-term plans: “The situation changes almost hourly,” a freight industry official in Shanghai said.

Easing India’s quality-control checks

India should offer to dismantle its onerous quality-control checks on imports to strike a trade deal with the US, a Bloomberg columnist argued. Nearly 800 products that come into India need to be certified by Indian inspectors at the overseas facility where they’re manufactured. The bureaucracy has been “weaponized” by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, “ostensibly to create jobs but really to protect powerful local interests,” Andy Mukherjee wrote. As a result, “everyone is waiting for the Indian quality inspector,” clogging up supply chains. With the US intent on lowering countries’ non-tariff trade barriers, eliminating the checks is a win-win, Mukherjee argued, allowing Modi to offer Washington a trade concession, while making India an easier place to do business.

Hundreds of US student visas revoked

US authorities have terminated visas for hundreds of international students, an escalation of Donald Trump’s crackdown on higher education and immigration. The US secretary of state said last month that 300 student visas had been revoked over pro-Palestinian activism. But that figure has risen to more than 600, according to a tally from Inside Higher Ed, with many terminations targeting regional public universities and small private colleges. As evidence for attempting to deport a Columbia University graduate student, a government memo suggested it could expel people based on their beliefs. Many foreign students haven’t been told why they had to leave the country, creating “widespread fear… that they could be targeted for unpredictable reasons,” The Wall Street Journal wrote.

Unions protest Milei’s austerity agenda

Much of Argentina came to a halt Thursday as some of the largest worker unions went on strike to protest President Javier Milei’s austerity measures. Trains and subways were disrupted, flights grounded, and banks closed. Milei’s extreme cost-cutting measures tipped the country into a deep recession last year, sparking domestic unrest: While the poverty rate fell sharply in the second half of 2024, a cost-of-living crisis persists. “They have to turn off the chainsaw,” a union official said. But global investors feel Argentina’s economy has landed “in a relatively better position,” a Bloomberg columnist argued, winning Milei international support from the right. The US Treasury secretary is set to visit Argentina next week in support of Milei’s reforms.

The World Economy Summit 2025 is bringing together the decision-makers who are shaping the future of global economic policy. The three-day summit, taking place from April 23–25, 2025 in Washington, DC, will focus on ways leaders across business, finance, tech, and beyond are navigating the complexities of tariffs, shifting trade dynamics, and evolving policy landscapes.

Featuring on-the-record conversations with Carlos Cuerpo, Minister for Economy, Trade and Business, Spain; Jan Jambon, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finances and Pensions, Belgium; Jörg Kukies, Federal Minister of Finance, Germany; Éric Lombard, Minister of Economy and Finance, France; Hon. John Mbadi Ngongó, Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury & Economic Planning, Kenya; Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, United Kingdom, and more, the summit will facilitate in-depth discussions on how countries are adapting to these challenges and building resilience in a rapidly changing world.

April 23-25 | Washington, DC | Learn More

Far side of Moon much drier

The first sample of rock taken from the Moon’s far side suggests that water is much rarer there than on the near side. China’s Chang’e mission last year brought about four pounds of regolith — moon rock — from a crater near the lunar south pole. The Moon was once believed to be bone dry, but in recent decades water was detected in samples from the near side. The Chang’e haul, though, was about 200 times drier. Scientists warned of over-extrapolating from a single sample, but if it is a consistent finding, it might give a more complete picture of how the Moon formed, and how meteorite impacts changed its surface over billions of years, The New York Times reported.

Race to save Swedish warship

A museum is racing to save a 17th-century Swedish warship that sank on its maiden voyage. The Vasa was a symbol of the newly ambitious Swedish state, but a design flaw meant it capsized 15 minutes after launching in 1628, taking dozens of sailors with it. The Baltic mud preserved it, and in 1961, it was salvaged and is now among Sweden’s most popular tourist attractions. But as with England’s Mary Rose, which also sank on its maiden voyage and was salvaged and displayed in Portsmouth, preservation is a challenge: The wood is shrinking and sagging, and it may collapse. Conservationists are building a steel cradle to support it, hoping to complete it for the 400th anniversary of its only voyage.

Germans obsess over white asparagus

White asparagus season has begun in Germany. It is the “unofficial beginning of springtime” in the country, The Associated Press wrote: “There is no other vegetable that Germans obsess about as much as white asparagus,” or “Spargel.” They call it “white gold,” and it sells for $11 a pound at the peak of the April-to-June season. Asparagus was supposedly brought to Central Europe by the Romans and has long been a delicacy, but Germans consider the white variety vastly superior to its more common green counterpart. They do not export any of their harvest, and “can discuss for hours whether it should be eaten with melted butter or… cut into slices and fried with bacon and onion.”

April 11:

• Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu makes his first court appearance since being detained in March.
• JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley report first-quarter earnings.
• 80th anniversary of the US liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp.

Rojak is a colloquial Malay word for “eclectic mix,” and is the name for a Javanese dish that typically combines sliced fruit and vegetables with a spicy dressing.

Adding their Tencents’ worth

Corporate Substacks are getting increasingly popular as more companies lean into content and storytelling to reach audiences directly, but one newsletter with apparent ties to Chinese tech giant Tencent is “Exhibit A of how NOT to Substack,” according to commentator and corporate communications consultant Ivy Yang. The “Tenchnology” newsletter — which began posting late last year — offered little about its writer or affiliation, and its posts took an “unfailingly positive, often effusive” position on Tencent’s products and strategy, Yang wrote in her newsletter Calling the Shots.

The Substack account also chimed in on industry conversations to add “context” that made the company look good. The patterns “suggest a concerted PR effort,” Yang wrote. “No one minds a company joining the chat, as long as you speak like a human and not a press release.” After being called out, the Substack updated its “About” page to state that it was run by a Tencent employee expressing their personal opinions.

Dox drama

A cyberbullying scandal in China involving the 13-year-old daughter of a Baidu executive sparked conversation in Chinese internet circles around doxxing. The incident erupted after the teenager exposed a woman’s personal details in an online forum for a K-pop artist fan group. Baidu, considered the Chinese equivalent of Google, denied accusations that the girl could have accessed the information through the company, suggesting she may have acquired the data from “darknet databases.”

Indeed, there’s a thriving black market in China for personal data. And doxxing has a decades-long history on the Chinese internet, the Sinica newsletter explained. Hackers in the 1990s would expose their rivals, and the habit became more mainstream in the mid-2000s. “Chinese doxxing often had a strong element of moral outrage and collective punishment,” Sinica wrote, but the practice has become more malicious as personal data is increasingly used for direct targeting. It’s especially linked to obsessive celebrity culture, wherein “fans trade personal data and seek revenge on anyone who criticizes their idols online.”

No going back

US President Donald Trump’s steep reciprocal tariffs against Japan sparked a “Zelenskyy moment” for some in Tokyo, political analyst Tobias Harris argued. Just like the heated showdown between Trump and the Ukrainian president in the White House in February was a wake-up call for Europe to no longer be complacent about US security guarantees, Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs similarly shocked Japan. “These reciprocal tariffs are a problem that has shaken international economic affairs to their very foundation,” one Japanese lawmaker said recently.

The official’s remarks suggested that Japan is recalibrating its relationship with Washington, and there’s no going back to the status quo in its trade and security dependency on the US, Harris wrote in his Observing Japan newsletter. Trump has backed down from most tariffs for now, and even if Tokyo strikes a trade deal, Japan will no longer be able to assume — as its former prime minister said last year — that it can count on Washington to make “noble sacrifices to fulfill its commitment to a better world.”

A sweeping retrospective of legendary visual artist David Hockney’s 70-year career opened at Paris’ Fondation Louis Vuitton, featuring more than 400 of his paintings, drawings, and digital works. The largest and perhaps final exhibition of his career, David Hockney 25 is an “elegiac, flamboyant exhibition of Hockney-picked greatest hits,” the Financial Times wrote, spanning iconic early pieces like 1972’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) and A Bigger Splash (1967). Hockney’s COVID-era iPad sketches, noted the FT, are “faux-naïf, easy codas to his life-long lucidly observed, ebulliently heightened realism.” “Life is a dream,” The Guardian wrote, “and Hockney dreams it well.”

Orbital Materials, a company founded by a former DeepMind researcher, is launching a first-of-its-kind effort to capture carbon from the air by piggybacking off the hot air emitted by data centers, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti reported.

In the age of AI, data centers are consuming enormous amounts of energy and boosting emissions. But Orbital Materials’ pilot program could do the opposite, resulting in a net reduction in carbon in the atmosphere — if it works.