Donald Trump’s many and overlapping tariff plans can be so hard to keep track of that even he sometimes appears to mix them up.
Asked by reporters recently about a coming deadline for tariffs, Trump sowed confusion by saying multiple times that they would come into effect on a different day.
He revised his comments the next day but markets can also be forgiven for still being confused after weeks of overlapping threats, pushed deadlines, and mixed signals from Trump and his team about what’s next.
Just in recent days, Trump began the week by enacting and then partially retreating from 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. He then ended the week by pledging new tariffs as soon as this weekend on Canada, potentially on lumber and dairy.
“Canada has been ripping us off for years on lumber and for dairy products,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Friday.
A series of rapid-fire tariff developments have left stocks yo-yoing on the uncertainty even as Trump himself dismisses the market turbulence as “a short-term interruption.”
Read more: What are tariffs, and how do they affect you?
Here’s a brief list of Trump’s major upcoming threats and their deadlines:
Coming days: New tariffs on Canadian lumber and dairy.
March 12: Blanket 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum on producers around the world.
April 2: Reciprocal tariffs on an array of nations.
April 2: Reinstatement of full 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico over fentanyl and illegal migration.
April 2: New tariffs on foreign agricultural goods.
Date TBD (likely April 2): 25% tariffs on the European Union.
Date TBD: New unspecific tariffs on a host of other sectors like automobiles, copper, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors.
Many of Trump’s recent deadlines have been pushed, leading to a growing pileup of sorts on April 2, which Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has called “the big transaction.”
But even for all the on-again, off-again tariff drama of his first weeks in office, Trump has only kept a few new duties in place for more than a few days. Most notably, Trump has shown little interest in reversing what are now 20% duties on Chinese goods.
New 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico also remain in place but now apply only to goods not traded under the rules of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, limiting their impact.
In terms of what’s to come, sorting out the real threats from the bluster is becoming a sort of high-stakes parlor game among market watchers.
A recent Goldman Sachs research paper on the issue, asking whether markets were properly pricing in the tariff impacts, noted that the answer hinges on whether Trump is “mostly talk, or big action.”
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