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Investing.com - U.S. President Donald Trump’s flurry of tariff announcements in recent days, including his new proposed levies on a slew of countries, represent "decidedly mixed news" for financial markets, according to analysts at Wolfe Research.
On Monday, Trump said he had sent letters to 14 different nations detailing new, heightened U.S. import tariffs, although he moved back the date when the duties would take effect from July 9 to August 1.
Among the tariffs, he proposed a 25% levy on major suppliers South Korea and Japan, along with a 30% levy on South Africa, a 32% duty on Indonesia, 35% on Bangladesh, and 36% on Thailand.
The president later told reporters that the August 1 deadline was not "100% firm," and that he remained open to more trade talks and potential deals.
Notably, the higher tariffs will not combine with previously announced sector tariffs such as those on automobiles, steel, and aluminum. Crucially, letters were not sent to India and the European Union, which analysts and media reports interpreted as an indication that possible trade deals may be imminent.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he expected to announce more trade deals in the coming days.
In a note to clients, the Wolfe Research analysts said the new tariff rates, when combined with a preliminary trade deal reached with Vietnam last week, would add $54 billion in annual government revenues.
However, they flagged that the tariff deadline extension essentially pushes out a 90-day pause that was previously instituted after Trump announced his punishing "reciprocal" levies in April -- and does not remove the threat of elevated tariffs snapping back into place in the weeks ahead.
Yet investors remain largely reassured by the belief that Trump will be flexible in ongoing trade negotiations and is not keen to see markets roil as they did in the wake of his "Liberation Day" event, the strategists said.
As a result, traders will "keep treating the new tariff numbers as a theoretical proposition until they actually take effect, but we continue to lean concerned rather than reassured on net," the analysts noted.
"At a very basic level, nothing actually happened based on Trump sending these letters, so there’s no reason to panic over headlines. But we think these moves do contain some signal about where the trade war is heading, and that signal is mostly hawkish."