What we’re reading (4/8)
“Stocks Slide Again As US Forges Ahead With 104% Tariffs On China” (Reuters). “The United States said on Tuesday that 104% duties on imports from China will take effect shortly after midnight, even as the administration of President Donald Trump moved to quickly start talks with other trading partners targeted by sweeping tariffs.”
“Trump’s Tariffs Put Fed Chair Powell In A ‘No-Win Situation’” (Wall Street Journal). “Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is facing an increasingly dreadful task. Economists, business owners and investors are betting that the uncertainty created by the sudden rollout of President Trump’s large tariff hikes, many of which are set to take effect Wednesday, will push the economy closer to a recession by weakening hiring and spending. That would call for cutting rates to cushion any downturn. At the same time, the magnitude of tariff increases is likely to lead prices to rise substantially for many imported goods, including materials used by domestic manufacturers.”
“A Contagion Of Uncertainty” (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press). “It is not merely that the policies keep on changing. We are seeing that the policies didn’t have much of a rational basis to begin with. Exactly how were all those threatened tariff rates calculated to begin with? A debate is raging across the internet and social media, but it seems they did not have much of a logical basis. We even were ready to put a tariff rate of 10 percent on the Heard Island and McDonald Islands (where?), which are inhabited mostly by penguins. Not a single step of this process has inspired confidence.”
“Signs Of Wall Street Stress Pile Up Amid Trump Tariff Turmoil” (Yahoo! Finance). “One concerning development is that there were no new offerings in the investment-grade and high-yield bond markets for three days, according to Reuters, as credit spreads widened due to concerns about the rising odds of a recession.”
“De-Extinction Company Announces That The Dire Wolf Is Back” (ars technica). “On Monday, biotech company Colossal announced what it views as its first successful de-extinction: the dire wolf. These large predators were lost during the Late Pleistocene extinctions that eliminated many large land mammals from the Americas near the end of the most recent glaciation. Now, in a coordinated PR blitz, the company is claiming that clones of gray wolves with lightly edited genomes have essentially brought the dire wolf back. (Both Time and The New Yorker were given exclusive access to the animals ahead of the announcement.)”
