CNBC Daily Open: Surprise tariff salvo on Saturday

No one likes working over the weekend.

Unless you are the leader of the free world firing off social media posts — that is, after all, what counts as work for many politicians nowadays —announcing barriers to the free movement of goods.

It’s anyone’s guess why U.S. President Donald Trump posted tariff letters to the European Union and Mexico — a steep 30% on goods imported from both — on Saturday. The first batch of letters was released Monday, and the second Wednesday. Going by that cadence, the latest letters should have been sent Friday.

Nope.

Here are two completely speculative conjectures:

Perhaps Trump wanted to save off his most devastating salvos — the EU and Mexico were, in 2024, the top-two largest trade partners of the U.S. — for when the markets were closed, hence avoiding any immediate backlash from traders.

But that seems unlikely, given that Trump told NBC News on Thursday that he thinks “the tariffs have been very well-received” because “the stock market hit a new high” then. And, as JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon pointed out on the same day, there is “complacency in the markets” because investors are a “little desensitized” to tariff news.

Perhaps Trump just wanted to annoy his counterparts, especially those on the continent. Working on a weekend might be exasperating to an American, but it’s basically sacrilegious for Europeans.

The combination of unexpectedly high tariffs — comments last week from Trump and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick gave the impression a favorable deal was in the books — and violating the right to disconnect would be sure to rile up Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and her ilk.

Perhaps there’s no point in trying to make sense of the announcements’ timing, let alone the tariffs. The only thing that’s certain is that, for many, there was no dancing on a Saturday night.

The U.S. imposes 30% tariffs on the EU and Mexico. Trump on Saturday revealed those tariffs in letters posted on Truth Social. The EU suspended its retaliatory tariffs, which were scheduled to take effect Monday, in hopes of reaching a deal.

U.S. stock futures slip Sunday evening stateside. Last week, all three major U.S. indexes fell on a weekly basis as investors braced themselves for more tariff announcements — which indeed came over the weekend. The Stoxx Europe 600 fell 1.01% Friday.

Trump can ‘certainly’ fire Powell. Those comments were made by National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett on Sunday stateside, who said that “if there’s cause,” Trump can remove Jerome Powell from his position as Federal Reserve chair.

‘You’re losing,’ Jamie Dimon tells Europe. On Thursday, JPMorgan’s CEO said at Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs that “Europe has gone from 90% U.S. GDP to 65% over 10 or 15 years. That’s not good.”

[PRO] Earnings season kicks off. Investors will want to keep an eye on second-quarter financial statements from big banks, such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, this week. But more important is their outlook on the second half of the year.

U.S. tariffs take center stage but China and the EU are quietly clashing

In recent weeks, European Union restrictions on Chinese companies taking part in public tenders for medical devices were quickly met with China imposing import curbs on such products. Separately, long-threatened Chinese duties on brandy from the EU came into force earlier this month, and both Beijing and Brussels have ramped up criticism of each another.

Altogether, EU-China trade relations are now “quite poor,” according to Marc Julienne, director of the Center of Asian Studies at the French Institute of International Relations.

— Sophie Kiderlin