In the last week, the Trump administration has managed to calm the trade war by agreeing provisional deals with the UK and China.Starting with China first because it's economically more important, here is a graph of how US tariffs applied to China have changed since Trump came to power:

First, a timeline of when the tariffs came into force:On April 2nd, "Liberation Day", a range of tariffs were announced, from 10% on the UK and Australia, 20% on the EU to 50% on tiny Lesotho. But additional tariffs announced on China took their total to 84%.

In an interview with Yahoo media on April 15th, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, "No one thinks steep China tariffs are sustainable over the long run".He was referring to the 145% tariffs President Trump had put on China in retaliation for China's retaliation for American retaliation to China's response to Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs on April 2nd.

One of the theories some pundits put forward for the huge tariffs, is that the Trump administration was trying to push bond yields lower.The reasoning went as follows: Scare the stock market with tariffs. Investors pull money from stocks and park the money in bonds. The more buying of bonds there is, the lower the yield on bonds. Then when the Treasury has to roll over it's debt, it does so at a lower interest rate. This theory has some plausibility as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this year that his main goal was to get the 10-year yield down.

So Trump announced new tariffs today, which are applicable to pretty much every country in the world. The minimum baseline tariff is 10%, but a lot of countries were hit with much higher tariffs. Here is the table issued by the White House:

For the last sixteen years, the US stock market has outperformed the rest of the world. This was helped by steady governance which resulted in a strong economy, while the eurozone was mired in a currency crisis, the UK was grappling with brexit, Japan was struggling with deflation and a falling population and China was dealing with a property crash.