New Tariffs Comments Could Cause Stock Turmoil Again
Heading into the weekend, on April 11, the U.S. released an updated list of products that they said won't be subject to "reciprocal" tariffs from China, including smartphones, computers and electronic chips. That exemption list included items that the U.S. needs from overseas production for inexpensive electronics, with not much domestic manufacturing capacity available and a high demand from U.S. consumers.
This likely made tech-heavy companies such as Apple and Nvidia breathe a sigh of relief, but they may have felt that relief a bit prematurely.
In an interview with NBC News' Kristen Welker on Meet the Press on April 13, top trade adviser Peter Navarro said that including smartphones, computers and electronic chips is "not an exclusion." According to NBC News, Navarro "did not agree that they were being exempted."
Those comments could make big tech, and their investors, nervous, as USA Today notes that the U.S.'s tariffs "flip-flops have sent the stock market on a roller coaster ride."
"What we're doing with chips — a problem, interestingly, for chips, because it's very complex stuff — is that we don't buy a lot of chips, like in bags. We buy them in products," Navarro said on Meet the Press.
"So what Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick is going to do — is doing it as we speak — is an investigation of the chip supply chain," he added. "The goal is stability and resilience, and you will see actions taken based on those investigations."
In a separate interview on April 13 on ABC's This Week, Lutnick signaled that "the exemption from reciprocal tariffs on these electronics was only temporary and a new round of duties targeting semiconductor chips would be forthcoming," NBC News notes.
"All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they’re going to have a special-focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored," Lutnick said on the ABC program.
Later, he added that was the U.S. is doing is "saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they’re included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two. So these are coming soon."
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