President Donald Trump said Thursday that 25% tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico would go into effect Tuesday.
In a post on his Truth Social app, Trump said the tariffs were needed to combat the continued flow of illicit drugs into the United States.
"We cannot allow this scourge to continue to harm the USA," he wrote, adding that the tariffs would be imposed "until it stops, or is seriously limited."
Trump also said reciprocal tariffs on major trading partners, which he threatened earlier this month, were slated to take effect April 2.
Major stock indexes retreated on the news after notching earlier gains Thursday morning. Trump has continued to keep markets off balance as he has advanced, then withdrawn, various tariff proposals in recent weeks. He has also offered conflicting rationales for imposing them, with a long-running fixation on closing the U.S. trade deficit giving way to ongoing concerns about drug flows — even though interdiction data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection show trafficking is already in retreat.
Days after first proposing the Canada and Mexico duties earlier this month, the president announced he was suspending them for 30 days after signaling he had won concessions from the two nations. Some experts said some of those gains, which included a troop deployment by Mexico and a new anti-drug policy for Canada were less substantial than heralded.
A proposal for steel and aluminum tariffs announced earlier this month are also scheduled to take effect Tuesday — but Trump did not mention those duties Thursday in his social media post.
More recently, the president called for tariffs on autos, computer chips and pharmaceuticals.
Yet, those, too, went unmentioned Thursday.
And as for the reciprocal duties now planned for April, the White House has signaled that those tariffs would also be contingent on studies of their potential impact.
All told, though Trump has threatened a bevy of tariffs since taking office, only an additional 10% duty on Chinese goods on top of existing levies on that nation have gone into effect so far.
Still, many analysts say the unpredictability alone created by Trump's talk of tariffs has already taken a toll on the markets and the economy.
"Instead of clearing up the uncertainty about the direction of U.S. economic policy, Donald Trump’s victory in last November’s presidential election has only magnified it," Capital Economics research and consultancy group said in a note to clients Thursday morning, "with threats of massive punitive tariffs and the potential upending of traditional geopolitical alliances plunging the rest of the world into a state of heightened uncertainty too. Uncertainty could end up weighing on global investment and consumer spending for an extended period, particularly if Trump repeatedly pushes back his tariff deadlines."
Trump has previously stated that the duties would bring in revenues and help close America's budget deficit.
“Our country will be extremely liquid and rich again,” he said.
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