Trump tariffs: Stocks plunge again as China hits back
Newshour
BBC
4.4 • 984 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
China announces further retaliatory tariffs on imports from the United States, bringing the world closer to an all-out trade war.
Also on the programme: South Korea's president has his impeachment upheld, and we hear from Tanzania on the benefits of the Chagga people's diet.
(Image: U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he boards Air Force One to travel to Palm Beach International Airport, at Miami International Airport on 3 April 2025. Credit: Reuters/Kent Nishimura)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service Studios in central London. |
| 0:09.6 | I'm Tim Franks. And as we come on air, still the market slide. And the prospect of a full-blown trade war draws ever closer with China today announcing that it will impose a new suite of |
| 0:23.6 | tariffs on U.S. imports. |
| 0:26.3 | The news, as reported on Chinese-Core country, the news, as reported on Chinese state television, |
| 0:35.2 | that at one minute past midnight on April the 10th, Beijing will levy an extra 34% on US imports. |
| 0:43.2 | In precise retaliation for the 34% surcharge that President Trump announced would be levied on Chinese imports into the United States, |
| 0:52.4 | it's not been quite as bruising a day so far as Thursday |
| 0:57.6 | proved for the markets, but there again for those stock markets across the world. Yesterday |
| 1:02.0 | was the worst day since COVID first hit five years ago. The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, |
| 1:07.9 | is currently in Brussels for a meeting of foreign ministers from |
| 1:11.4 | NATO, the transatlantic military alliance. He said that the current market meltdown should be seen |
| 1:16.1 | not as a rebuke, but as a reset. Their markets are reacting to a dramatic change in the global |
| 1:22.9 | order in terms of trade. And so what happens is pretty straightforward. If you're a company |
| 1:27.2 | and you make a company and you |
| 1:27.6 | make a bunch of your products in China and all of a sudden, shareholders or people that |
| 1:32.3 | play the stock market realize that it's going to cost a lot more to produce in China, |
| 1:36.7 | your stock is going to go down. But ultimately, the markets, as long as they know what the |
| 1:41.3 | rules are going to be moving forward, and as long as that's set and you can sustain where you're going to be, the markets will adjust. |
| 1:47.5 | Businesses around the world, including in trade and global trade, they just need to know what the rules are. |
| 1:52.0 | Once they know what the rules are, they will adjust to those rules. |
| 1:54.9 | So I don't think it's fair to say economies are crashing. Markets are crashing because markets are based on the stock value of companies who today are embedded in modes of production that are bad for the United States. We have to |
| 2:05.6 | be a country that think we're the largest consumer market in the world, and yet the only thing |
... |
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