Stocks closed higher yesterday with all of the major indexes in the green ahead of the Administration's announcement on tariffs.

At 4:00 PM ET, President Trump took to the podium and began announcing the tariffs that will be placed on our trading partners.

The first tariff he led off with was confirming that the U.S. will indeed charge a 25% tariff on all foreign made autos. He announced that last week, but with the previous pauses, there were questions on if and when it would happen. But it was confirmed yesterday, and it begins/began at midnight.

Stocks shot up roughly 1% in after-hours trade following that announcement.

But then came the other tariffs, and the market turned lower.

The long-awaited reciprocal tariffs will now be called the discounted reciprocal tariffs in that the U.S. will reciprocate by roughly half of what the other countries charge us.

That effectively puts a 34% tariff on China, 24% on Japan, and a 20% tariff on the EU.

Then he announced that there would also be a minimum baseline tariff of 10% on all U.S. imports to discourage cheating.

At the end of his announcement, the President talked about tax cuts, which will include tax deductible interest on loans for U.S. made autos. But all of that has to weave its way through Congress.

So for now, the market is focused on the tariffs (since that begins immediately), and what that will mean not only for the U.S. economy, but also the global economy.

By the time the announcement was over, the S&P was down by roughly -2.5% in after-hours.

The President said countries can lower the tariffs levied on them, by lowering the tariffs (whether they be monetary or non-monetary) they impose on us.

I expect the negotiations to begin in earnest. Some have already begun. And some countries have already pledged to remove all their tariffs on U.S. goods. Israel, for example, announced that on Tuesday.

Canadian Premier Doug Ford, on Wednesday morning, before the President's announcement in the afternoon, said his country would "be willing to take these tariffs off tomorrow...if he (President Trump) said he's taking their tariffs off."

Now that we know what tariffs the U.S. will impose on other countries, we'll see how these countries plan to respond. Will the worst offenders ratchet up their tariffs and start a trade war? Or will cooler heads prevail and lead to tariffs coming down?

Ironically, in spite of the big tariff announcement, there's still plenty of uncertainty, especially surrounding the 10% baseline tariffs. What if a country agrees to drop all tariffs and barriers to entry? Will there still be a 10% tariff? If so, what incentive is there for other countries to remove them all?

Interestingly, he said "in the coming days, there will be complaints from the globalists, and the outsourcers...," "but never forget that every prediction" they have made in "the last 30 years" has been "wrong."

In other news, it was reported that Amazon and AppLovin have made offers for TikTok. This, in and of itself, is newsworthy. But given the recently announced tariffs, I'm reminded of the President's comments last week about possibly reducing tariffs on China if they can approve a sale of TikTok.

We shall see.

As if the week wasn't busy enough, on Friday we'll get the Employment Situation report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

But in the meantime, we've got plenty of info to sift thru today first.

See you tomorrow,