Live Updates: Markets Slide Further as U.S. Imposes Punishing Tariffs

Losses have mounted in stock markets around the world since Mr. Trump announced this latest round of tariffs last week, and the tumult has started spreading to government bonds, which are traditionally seen as safe havens in times of uncertainty. Yields rise when investors sell bonds, which can reflect worries about inflation, shifts away from U.S. dollar assets or a need for investors to raise cash to cover losses on other trades.

Rising yields push up the cost of borrowing for mortgages, credit cards, business loans and many other rates, an unwelcome development for the Trump administration, which has made reducing rates a priority, since cheaper debt supports economic growth.

Asian markets slumped again on Wednesday, and stocks in Europe also fell in early trading. France’s CAC 40 index plunged, wiping out its gains since the beginning of the year.

The S&P 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, is close to tumbling into a bear market, a worrisome threshold for investors. S&P futures, which let investors bet on the direction of the index before it resumes trading in New York, fluctuated between losses and gains, continuing the choppy pattern of recent days.

The market rout reflects deepening concern that Mr. Trump’s tariffs could disrupt global supply chains, fuel inflation and set off a severe economic downturn.

Many world leaders have rushed to negotiate with the Trump administration, scheduling phone calls and sending delegations to Washington. Governments including Taiwan and Vietnam have offered concessions in hopes of avoiding the tariffs. Mr. Trump said that 70 countries had approached the United States, and that officials would begin talks with Japan and South Korea.

Here’s what else to know:

• Asian industry: In commercial and industrial hubs across Asia, businesses grappled with the effects of the levies. Along a strip of small garment and machinery shops in Guangzhou, China, the mood among factory owners was tense. One said he was confident that Americans would still want his exports, but added that he was worried about a drop in consumer confidence and spending in the United States.

• Indian pharmaceuticals: Mr. Trump spooked India’s pharmaceutical industry, the country’s most successful exporters, when he said Tuesday that he would soon announce “a major tariff” on drugmakers. The companies had been exempted in the first round of levies, but Mr. Trump has argued that in the long term more medications should be made in the United States.

• Rate cuts: At least two central banks cut borrowing costs on Tuesday, citing the levies and growing pessimism about the global economy. India and New Zealand made the moves at meetings that had been scheduled ahead of the tariffs taking effect.

The missive assailed the United States for preparing to impose additional 90 percent tariffs on May 2 on low-value parcels from China, which enter the United States with no customs inspection and no duties paid. The value of these so-called de minimis shipments has soared more than tenfold in recent years, exceeding $60 billion last year.

There were a few unexpected conciliatory notes in the Chinese statement. “As two major countries at different stages of development with distinct economic systems, it is natural for China and the U.S. to have differences and frictions in their economic and trade cooperation,” it said.

The report, issued by the State Council Information Office, criticized the United States for having considerably tightened export controls on the transfer to China of technologies with both civilian and military applications. The office suggested that this was a violation of the spirit of the so-called Phase One agreement reached in 2020.

It said that China had abided by the pact, which also called for China to increase its purchases of American energy, agricultural products and manufactured goods, such as aircraft from Boeing, the American aerospace giant.

“The Chinese side upheld the spirit of contract and endeavored to overcome multiple adverse factors, including the unexpected impact of the pandemic, subsequent supply chain disruptions, and global economic recession, to ensure implementation of the agreement,” the report said.

China cited production delays by Boeing during the pandemic as reasons for not fulfilling that part of the pact.

While Boeing has had delays, Chinese government-controlled airlines have refused to accept delivery of dozens of previously ordered planes for six years. At the same time, a heavily subsidized state-owned manufacturer, the Shanghai-based Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, is racing to make its own single-aisle passenger planes.

The commentary praised de minimis shipments as giving greater choice to consumers and helping small businesses to compete. Large Chinese e-commerce sites like Shein and Temu have expanded their shipments from factories in China straight to American households.

The document noted that China allows de minimis shipments of parcels through delivery services. But in practice, China allows a far narrower exemption from tariffs than the $800 under the U.S. de minimis rules, limiting the value of many exempted parcels to $27.

The document also did not mention that Congress raised the American de minimis limit to $800 in 2016, from $200 previously, kicking off a huge surge in such shipments across the Pacific from China and fueling a boom for Chinese e-commerce companies.

Yields are still generally lower than when Mr. Trump was inaugurated, but a sustained sell-off of Treasuries would erase the key difference between the global market response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs and Ms. Truss’s tax cuts. In the immediate aftermath of the president’s tariff announcement, bond yields actually drifted down, even as the stock market plummeted and dollar weakened. It was a welcome island of stability, and a reminder of the traditional status of the American bond market as a haven for investors.

Now, that safe-haven status may be crumbling, according to some analysts. At the extreme, that could raise pressure on the Federal Reserve to intervene, which is what the Bank of England did in 2022 to shore up the British bond market.

In Britain’s case, those dramatic events forced Ms. Truss to rescind her proposed tax cuts, and the market chaos subsided. But Ms. Truss’s credibility was destroyed, and she was forced to step down after 44 days in office. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has shown no sign that he plans to reverse the tariffs, and for now, there appear to be few political levers to force his hand.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration carried out its threat to increase tariffs on Chinese exports by an additional 50 percent unless China rescinded its own retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods from last week. The minimum tax on Chinese imports is now a staggering 104 percent.

With China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and Mr. Trump locked in a game of chicken — each unwilling to risk looking weak by making a concession — the trade fight could spiral out of control, inflaming tensions over other areas of competition like technology and the fate of Taiwan, the self-governing island claimed by Beijing.

Mr. Trump’s bare-knuckle tactics make him a singular force in U.S. politics. But in Mr. Xi, he faces an opponent who survived the turmoil of China’s late-20th-century political purges, and who views the United States’ competitive tactics as ultimately aimed at subverting the ruling Communist Party’s legitimacy.

“Trump has never gone into a back-alley brawl where the other side is willing to brawl and use the same kind of tactics as him,” said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “For China, this is about their sovereignty. This is about the Communist Party’s hold on power. For Trump, it might just be a political campaign.”

China’s economy, which was already in a vulnerable state because of a property crisis, now faces the specter of a global recession and a devastating slowdown in trade, its defining industry and main driver of growth. In a sign of Beijing’s growing unease, Chinese censors appeared to be blocking social media searches of hashtags that referred to the number 104, as in the size of the American tariffs.

“This is a huge shock to the China-U.S. economic relationship, like an earthquake,” Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said of the tariffs imposed on Wednesday. “It remains to be seen if this is temporary turmoil or a long-term unavoidable trend.”

To be sure, a U.S.-China decoupling is still far from becoming reality. Chinese and American companies like TikTok and Starbucks are both still entrenched in each other’s countries. And Chinese banks remain hitched to the U.S. dollar-dominated financial system.

China and the United States are still at the brinkmanship stage, Mr. Kennedy said, each trying to force the other to offer a deal on bended knee. But the spat could become more dangerous if the Trump administration goes after Chinese financial institutions — for instance, by rescinding the licenses of Chinese banks in the United States or booting them off the international payments system Swift.

In pushing back against Mr. Trump’s moves, Beijing has cast itself as a victim of unfair American trade practices and protectionism. The irony is that China has done the same, if not worse, over the decades by limiting foreign investment and subsidizing Chinese firms.

Mr. Xi himself has made no direct comment about the latest U.S. tariffs. On Wednesday afternoon, though, shortly after they took effect, Chinese state media announced that he gave a speech in a meeting with the other six members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of power in China, as well as other top officials. In it, Mr. Xi called on officials to bolster ties with China’s neighbors and “strengthen industrial and supply chain cooperation.”

A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Lin Jian, did address the new tariffs, saying on Wednesday that China would “never accept such arrogant and bullying behavior” and would “definitely retaliate.”

Any fracture between the Chinese and American economies will be felt across the world. Business was the bedrock of the bilateral relationship for nearly five decades. Without it, their engagement on other global issues, like security, climate change and future pandemics and financial crises, would likely stall.

China has tried to downplay its vulnerability to the economic chaos unleashed by the Trump administration. It says it has reduced its reliance on U.S. markets for its exports and that its economy is getting more self-sufficient, especially when it comes to developing homegrown technologies.

But that papers over serious problems in the Chinese economy, which has been largely stagnant because of a collapse in the property market. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s assault on the global trading system, which includes targeting countries like Vietnam where Chinese companies had opened factories to circumvent earlier U.S. tariffs, strikes at the core of one of China’s only current economic bright spots.

The fallout from the trade disruption will hurt the United States, which relies on China for all sorts of manufactured goods, but will do more damage to China, said Wang Yuesheng, the director of the Institute of International Economics at Peking University.

“The impact on China is mainly that Chinese products have nowhere to go,” Mr. Wang said. That will ravage export-oriented companies making things like furniture, clothing, toys and home appliances along China’s eastern seaboard, which largely exist to serve American consumers.

“These companies will be hit very hard,” Mr. Wang said.

The threat to China’s exports compounds the challenging task of bringing back foreign investment, which has undergone an exodus since the Covid pandemic and the introduction of strict national security laws that made doing business in China increasingly difficult.

Mr. Xi has tried to woo foreign investors back, hosting a group of executives from overseas last month in Beijing. In a speech, he said China’s development was owed not only to the leadership of the Communist Party, but to the “support and help of the international community, including the contributions made by foreign-funded enterprises in China.”

Beijing’s strategy now is to push back at the United States and hope that Mr. Trump succumbs to domestic pressure to reverse course, said Evan Medeiros, a professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University who served as an Asia adviser to President Barack Obama.

“They know that if they give in to pressure they will get more pressure,” he said. “They will resist it with the belief that China can withstand more pain than they can.”

Until then, China’s leaders appear to be girding the country for a protracted fight. One sign: Influential bloggers have been allowed to weigh in on the crisis and suggest ways to retaliate against the United States.

One of them, Ren Yi, a Harvard-educated Chinese blogger who goes by the pen name “Chairman Rabbit,” listed six potential countermeasures, including restrictions in China on U.S. service businesses like law firms and consultancy companies; cutting imports of American poultry and soybeans; and ending cooperation with Washington on reducing the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

“The trade war,” he wrote, “is not simply an economic friction but a ‘war without smoke.’ This must be understood from that perspective.”

Vivian Wang contributed reporting from Beijing.

The final list is expected to exclude bourbon, for instance, after Mr. Trump threatened to place a 200 percent tariff on all European alcohol in response to its inclusion. That would have been a crushing blow for wine producers in France, Italy and Spain.

“We are not in a business of going, let’s say, cent for cent, or tit for tat, or dollar for dollar,” Maros Sefcovic, the bloc’s trade commissioner, said this week.

Since last month, the United States has introduced tariffs of 25 percent on steel, aluminum and cars, and broad 20 percent on everything else coming from Europe — and those broad-based tariffs took effect on Wednesday. European Union officials have said they would prefer to negotiate to get rid of those higher levies, and have even offered to cut tariffs to zero on cars and other industrial products if the United States does the same.

But with serious negotiations slow to materialize, Europe is striking back in a staggered way. The retaliatory tariffs up for a vote on Wednesday would be a first step, in response only to steel and aluminum levies.

E.U. officials are expected to announce the next step, a plan to hit back at both the car levies and the 20 percent tariffs, as soon as early next week. Much as with the steel and aluminum retaliation, they plan to lay out the suggested contours of the response, then consult with member states, which will then vote on whether to go ahead.

The officials have insisted that all options are on the table, which means that further measures could follow.

For instance, some national officials have suggested that Europe should use a new trade weapon that is often referred to as the European Union’ s “bazooka” to hit American service companies, including big tech firms like Google.

Those measures have not been tried before, but they would potentially give Brussels a more powerful negotiating position: Europe buys more services from America than it sells. Europeans are critical to technology giants’ bottom lines.

Yet whether such an aggressive services retaliation will actually happen is still unclear. It would be difficult to design in a way that would not cost Europeans — who have come to rely on services like Google search and American cloud technology — and different European capitals have different appetites for retaliation.

For now, the goal is to slowly and deliberately roll out a response, hoping that Europe’s huge consumer market and significant economic might will be enough to prod Washington closer to working out a solution.

“Europe is always ready for a good deal,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the E.U.’s executive branch, said this week. “But we are also prepared to respond through countermeasures and defend our interests.”

“There is a lot of uncertainty in Washington as far as who we talk to and which policymakers that we need to be in touch with,” Thomas Djiwandono, Indonesia’s deputy finance minister, said in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Tuesday. “Just to give everybody here a bit of color, that when you are talking to the U.S. Trade Representative, it might be different from talking to the Commerce Department.”

Mr. Thomas spoke on the sidelines of a summit of finance ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. His comments were reflective of the confusion, concern and quiet anxiety that clouded the gathering as the region grappled with the implications of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on its export-driven economies.

The annual meeting typically unfolds with little fanfare and attracts scant attention beyond policy circles. But this year, the new U.S. taxes on the region’s exports — which range from apparel to computer chips — has raised the stakes, leaving the region on the precipice of profound economic disruption.

“Rarely have we seen such stark exposure — so sudden, so destabilizing and so real,” Kao Kim Hourn, the ASEAN general-secretary, said in a speech on Wednesday.

The region has been hit with some of the heftiest of Mr. Trump’s tariffs. Cambodian imports are now subject to a 49 percent duty, while Vietnam is facing a rate of 46 percent and 32 percent was levied to Indonesia. Investors have reacted by pummeling stock markets across the region in recent days.

As Southeast Asian countries move to mitigate the effects of the levies, one thing is clear: Unlike China, they are not retaliating with their own tariffs.

Some, like Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, have offered to reduce duties on U.S. imports and lift other trade restrictions. As the countries chart their own recourse, the bloc, chaired by Malaysia this year, is also expected to take a unified approach to the tariffs. Those discussions are scheduled for Thursday, the last day of the finance ministers’ meeting.

There was also a sense of quiet urgency at the gathering. Singapore’s second minister for finance, Chee Hong Tat, called on ASEAN countries to “speed things up” on regional trade initiatives.

Southeast Asia has emerged as an alternative to China’s manufacturing prowess in recent years. Many businesses moved their factories, or large chunks of production, to the region after Mr. Trump started a trade war with China in his first term. It remains unclear how the new tariffs will reverberate across the regions.

“Some companies that I have spoken to are looking to absorb half of the cost and pass on the other half to consumers and see what happens,” Benjamin Hung, Standard Chartered’s president for international operations, said in an interview during the event.

But the host of the summit projected calm. Malaysia, whose exports will be subject to a 24 percent tariff, is also planning talks in Washington.

“I am chill,” Amir Hamzah Azizan, Malaysia’s second finance minister, said on Tuesday.

Most investors do not share his sentiment. Malaysia’s main stock index is down about 8 percent in the past week.

India has spent most of a week trying to find reasons for hope after the shock of being hit with a 27 percent blanket rate. One of the best was the fact that the global pharmaceutical industry was excluded from the first round of tariffs.

Last year India exported almost $13 billion worth of drugs, many of them generics. That makes pharmaceuticals India’s most successful industrial export. The United States is its biggest market.

In the short term, there’s no realistic way for the United States to replace the Indian supply: The next biggest exporter of generic drugs is China, which is suddenly facing higher tariffs than any other country.

Mr. Trump’s idea is that in the long term these medications can be made domestically. They would have to become much more expensive before that happens: Medicines come up in Economics 101 as the best example of a product with “inelastic demand,” something that consumers will keep buying even when the price goes up.

India’s government ministers have been talking up the possibility of a bilateral agreement between their prime minister, Narendra Modi, and Mr. Trump. Two ministers spoke optimistically this week about the “new opportunities” these tariffs are creating for India. They are inspired by the fact that India’s nearest competitors in traded goods — including China, Vietnam and Bangladesh — will suffer from even higher rates.

On Mumbai’s stock market, shares of India’s biggest and most profitable drugmakers started the trading day sharply lower on the overnight news from Trump’s dinner.

Mr. Trump’s harshest tariffs went into effect on Wednesday on products that are made in China and some of its rising manufacturing rivals in Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia. The levies will transform these factory economies, once the world’s most sought after locations for making cars, bags, shoes and gadgets that Americans buy, into the last places on earth that any company wants to be.

Then there’s the Philippines.

The Southeast Asian country was also hit with tariffs, but its economic reliance on services and agriculture left it less exposed to the Trump administration’s reciprocal tariffs meant to punish manufacturing economies and bring factory jobs back to the United States. Goods coming from the Philippines will be taxed 17 percent, still high, but less than half of what products from Thailand will be tariffed and almost a third less than the levy on Vietnam.

The Philippines may be the only government in the world that has called Mr. Trump’s tariffs “good news.” Speaking hours after Mr. Trump announced them last week, a press officer for the Philippines government said the impact of tariffs would be “very minimal,” adding that “we may also gain investors from countries that have greater tariffs.”

Suddenly, the Philippines is popping up on the radar as companies scramble to find alternatives to their factories in places like Vietnam and Thailand.

At least half a dozen companies with customers in the United States have made inquiries in the last few weeks with Mr. Liu’s factory and his neighbors in one area of Batangas province that is a 90-minute drive south of Manila. Some have made commitments to shift production. It’s an unexpected turn of events for a country that has long lacked the manufacturing prowess that has pulled many other Asian nations out of poverty.

The shift could be temporary. Countries like Vietnam are racing to strike deals with Washington and reverse tariffs that will be catastrophic for their economies. And the Philippines faces a host of challenges that make it a more difficult place to get a factory going quickly. Raw materials like rubber and steel are difficult to procure and more expensive than in countries like China. Construction takes longer. But the Philippines has a large and young work force that costs less.

Mr. Liu began to move most of his factory production from Dongguan, in southern China, to Batangas in 2018 when Mr. Trump launched a trade conflict with China during his first term.

The American and Japanese companies that he supplies parts to like the Japanese electronic company Epson and Emerson, an industrial equipment maker based in St. Louis, had begun closing their factories in China and moving out. It was hard at first. There weren’t a lot of options for labor. Raw materials like aluminum was three times more expensive than in China. The workers he hired were not as productive as in China.

Still, everyone was optimistic. “The Philippines is like China was 15 years ago,” said Kevin Lee, a sales director at HYS Enterprise, which owns the factory in Batangas. Cheaper labor helped. It costs about $820 a month employ someone in China; in the Philippines that same worker costs $274, Mr. Lee said.

HYS started shipping two containers’ worth of raw materials from China each week stuffed with plastic pellets, aluminum sheet rolls and bolts and nuts. Mr. Liu brought in Chinese engineers to work with local staff and to start automating some of the manufacturing processes. Business picked up and four years later, in 2022, they bought 20,000 square meters for a third factory that will soon start die casting as well as painting for products like the door panels of Toyota cars.

The decision to move production to the Philippines from China paid off this week as the Trump administration raised tariffs on Chinese goods to more than 100 percent.

Now Mr. Liu is pitching his factory as a “one stop shop” alternative for factories in neighboring countries.

“You can’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he told a prospective new client on a recent visit to the factory as engineers stood close by, designing new tools for metal stamping and wire cutting machines.

In the newly built factory next door, injection molding machines sucked in plastic pellets and spat out printer trays. Several rows over, three giant laser cutting devices stamped and cut sheets of metal that will be used in power supply cases for Emerson. On the other side of the factory floor, a worker was leaving his welding station for lunch. A box of metal parts revealed his morning’s work, dozens of metal parts that are used to hold the wires on a Honda motorbike.

At the Fong Shann Printing factory a few blocks away, four companies with plants in Vietnam, Taiwan and China have visited in recent days to talk about contracting the factory to make the boxing materials for products they will start producing in the Philippines.

“We already have four new customers,” said Alan Tu, the vice general manager of Fong Shann’s factory in the Philippines. “After the tariff issue, they are looking elsewhere.”

On a recent day, three design and quality control employees were printing and reading — line by line — the instruction manual for a scientific calculator sold by Texas Instruments.

Around the corner, past towers of cardboard packaging, large industrial printers were churning out marketing for food products, and boxes for electric pianos and Casio calculators.

Prompted by customers in countries from Australia to Britain that have fretted over bungled supply chains and growing superpower tensions, some manufacturers have rented land in this special economic zone, one of dozens that offer tax incentives to test out whether they can make their products in the Philippines.

A short drive away in another industrial park, the Japanese medical device company Arkray is making preparations to scale up the manufacturing of its products that get shipped to the United States, which include health devices like lactate monitors and diabetes and urinalysis testing devices.

“We are talking about how we can change the supply chain,” said Hideaki Anai, the chief supply chain officer at Arkray. The company does most of its development in Japan but has opened factories around the world, most recently in Vietnam and Mexico.

“We can move maybe 70 percent of the products which we are sending to the U.S. from other countries,” Mr. Anai said. The change, which will affect around half of all the products that Arkray sells, will take a month to make happen because the company’s 400 or so products will need to be registered differently and the labels will need to be changed, Mr. Anai said.

“The Philippines was 0 percent but they will now charge 17 percent,” he said.

“Compared to Japan, which is now 25 percent, and Taiwan, which is 32 percent, the 17 percent is much better.”

But other hashtags that focused more squarely on mocking the United States, or on touting China’s strengths, were allowed to trend — and in fact were explicitly initiated by state media. “America is fighting a trade war while begging for eggs” was one popular hashtag started by CCTV, China’s state broadcaster. “China does not provoke trouble but is never afraid of it” was another.

State media outlets adopted a similarly swaggering tone in their coverage. Several opinion pieces in the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, declared that China had learned from years of trade frictions to diversify and shore up its economy. “In Chinese people’s genes, we never fear any risks, challenges, difficulties or contradictions, and can regard all kinds of external pressure as the driving force for our own progress,” one piece said.

Other pieces did not directly reference the tariffs but still touted the strengths of the Chinese economy. A front-page article in the People’s Daily laid out steps that the government would take to promote employment for fresh graduates.

Mr. Xi himself has not publicly addressed the new tariffs. But on Wednesday afternoon, Chinese state media published his first public remarks since the latest escalation in the trade war, saying that he had met with his innermost circle of top officials on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The announcement made no direct mention of tariffs. But it said that the conference had been about how China could bolster its ties with neighboring countries and “strengthen industrial and supply chain cooperation,” in the face of “global changes.”

The announcement said Mr. Xi had told the gathered officials that it was important to “focus on building a community of shared future” — one of his hallmark diplomatic slogans.

The message mirrored much of what Chinese state media has said about the trade war: that China is a reliable partner for other countries, unlike the volatile United States. (The reality is more complicated: Neighboring countries have also expressed concerns about excessive Chinese exports hurting their own industries. And China has territorial disputes with many of its neighbors.)

Aside from official media, prominent Weibo influencers also projected self-assurance, saying the trade war was proof that the United States was in decline, or that it was time for China to flex its strength.

“However long they want to fight, we will!” Pang Jiulin, a lawyer in Beijing with more than 10.5 million followers, wrote on the platform. “China’s system means that China really can do whatever it takes, and that those who pay the price in China won’t protest like the large-scale demonstrations in the U.S.”

Though some users described worries about the trade war’s repercussions, voices expressing dissent or concern were generally limited.

It was not clear whether other more negative posts had been censored, or why censors had targeted the hashtags about the 104 statistic in particular. Many individual posts that mentioned the figure were still visible, even as the hashtags themselves were blocked, and they generally expressed confidence about China’s prospects in the trade war.

But the government likely wanted to direct attention away from the specifics of the high tariff rate, because of the severe implications it could have for the Chinese economy, said Ja Ian Chong, a professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

“I think the CCP may not want to reveal how serious things are,” Professor Chong said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

The party and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, “may not have a plan on how to address such complications as yet, so are probably trying to control narratives and direct vitriol toward the U.S. and Trump,” he added.

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

Mr. Trump on Tuesday cheered the imminent arrival of the negotiating team from South Korea, which is led by Trade Minister Cheong In-kyo.

“Their top TEAM is on a plane heading to the U.S., and things are looking good,” Mr. Trump said on his Truth Social platform. “We are likewise dealing with many other countries, all of whom want to make a deal with the United States.”

South Korea’s interim leader, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, on Tuesday suggested that his country was ready to make compromises aimed at pleasing Mr. Trump.

In an interview with CNN, Mr. Han said South Korea would not band together with China to push back against Mr. Trump’s tariffs. South Korea “clearly would like to negotiate” with Washington, he said. “I don’t think that kind of fighting back will improve the situation dramatically.”

In a telephone call with Mr. Trump later Tuesday, Mr. Han also said his country was willing to cooperate with the United States in shipbuilding and liquefied natural gas, as well as reducing South Korea’s $55.7 billion trade surplus, the South Korean leader’s office said.

South Korea has built its war-torn country into a global economic powerhouse based largely on exports. Mr. Trump’s sweeping 25 percent tariffs hit its biggest export engines, especially its car industry.

The measures to support carmakers that South Korea announced Wednesday included raising financing support to 15 trillion won, or about $10 billion, in 2025 from the 13 trillion won previously planned. Taxes on automobile purchases will also be lowered to 3.5 percent from 5 percent currently until June, and electric-vehicle subsidies will be increased.

In addition to trade, South Korea also relies more than ever for its security on the United States and their seven-decade-old military alliance. That has become all the more pressing as North Korea expands its nuclear threat and forges a military alliance of its own with Russia.

Mr. Trump has already turned this week’s negotiations into more than a trade talk, indicating that he wanted South Korea to drastically increase what it pays for keeping 28,500 American troops on the country’s soil.

The statement from Mr. Han’s office said the United States reconfirmed its commitment to the military alliance with South Korea. But after the call, Mr. Trump also said he and Mr. Han talked about “payment for the big-time military protection we provide to South Korea.”