CBS News – April 9, 2025

The sweeping tariffs President Trump announced last week were a “negotiating strategy,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested Wednesday as the president announced a 90-day pause on most of those tariffs.

“We saw the successful negotiating strategy that President Trump implemented a week ago today – it has brought more than 75 countries forward to negotiate,” Bessent said about the tariffs that Mr. Trump announced on April 2.

Bessent said that “every country in the world who wants to come and negotiate, we are willing to hear you, we are going to go down to a 10% baseline tariff for them,” he said, speaking outside the White House moments after Mr. Trump announced the pause via a Truth Social post.

Wall Street signaled its relief at Mr. Trump’s pause, sending the S&P 500 surging by more than 8% on Wednesday afternoon. Economists had warned that the Trump administration’s trade war could raise the risk of a recession and reignite inflation because U.S. businesses like Walmart are on the hook for paying the tariffs on imports, which they then typically pass on in whole or part to consumers.

Prior to Mr. Trump’s pause, stocks had been edging toward a bear market, or when shares fall more than 20% from their most recent high. Companies including Delta Airlines had warned about the impact of tariffs, which has caused some consumers to pare spending amid economic uncertainty.

“This was the news we and everyone on the Street was waiting for as the pressure on Trump took on a life of its own,” Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives said in a research note Wednesday.

China’s tariff rate

Bessent said that China is an exception to Mr. Trump’s easing, with the tariff rate on goods imported from the country rising to 125% “due to their insistence on escalation.”

That escalation refers to China saying it was raising tariffs on U.S. products to 84%, up from its previously announced 34% – after President Trump’s import duties on Chinese goods went into effect overnight Wednesday at a rate of 104%.

Bessent said he was not calling it a “trade war.” He also said “it’s about bad actors,” and that China is “the biggest source of the U.S. trade problems.”

“We are going to work on a solution with our trading partners,” he said.

But experts noted that Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs nevertheless are heightening uncertainty for corporations across the globe, making it more difficult for them to plan ahead or to make major investments.

“Uncertainty is bad for investment, and now uncertainty is three times higher — even if this goes away, in back of your head, if you are thinking about spending billions in the U.S., does this make you think twice?” Scott Lincicome, a trade expert at the Cato Institute, told CBS MoneyWatch prior to Mr. Trump’s Wednesday announcement.

“Art of the Deal”

But at the White House on Wednesday, Trump administration spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt compared the president’s actions to the “art of the deal,” an apparent reference to Mr. Trump’s 1987 business advice book by that title.

“[M]any of you in the media clearly missed the art of the deal,” Leavitt said. “You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.”