Arvind's Newsletter

1.US President Donald Trump’s mass global tariffs hammered global markets amid warnings they would undermine American dominance. 

Stocks plummeted, wiping an estimated $2.5 trillion off the value of US equities, while oil prices suffered their biggest fall since 2022. One prominent German think tank projected that the US itself would be worst affected by the “Liberation Day” duties in the short-term, a trade expert warned that companies and countries would “move away from” American standards and leadership in the coming years, and The New York Times’ global economics correspondent argued Trump’s trade policy “risks forfeiting America’s economic primacy.” The Economist’s editor-in-chief was succinct: “Mr Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ was more like ruination day.”

2.How America could end up making China great again: The Economist

AS DONALD TRUMP unleashes a volley of tariffs and his administration talks up the strength of its military alliances in Asia, you might think that these are anxious times in the country that America sees as its main adversary. In fact, our reporting from Beijing reveals a very different picture. MAGA is putting pressure on China’s leaders to correct their worst economic errors. It is also creating opportunities to redraw the geopolitical map of Asia in China’s favour.

China has come out badly from Mr Trump’s Rose Garden rant. Counting the new levy of 34%, plus existing duties, the total rises to 65%—and slightly higher if you include the disruptive removal of a tariff exemption for small packages. Given that exports are still roughly 20% of GDP, as they were in 2017, this will hurt China’s economy. China’s tactic of rerouting its firms’ manufacturing chains through countries such as Vietnam to bypass tariffs will work less well now that America is erecting barriers globally.

The trade war comes as China is still struggling with deflation, a housing bust and dismal demography. For the past five years the Communist Party has neglected weak consumption and embraced an unwise statism that has cramped the private sector. China has exported its overcapacity, swamping the world with goods, and fostered a spiky chauvinism that unsettles America’s allies both in Asia and Europe.

Despite all this, China enters the new age of MAGA stronger than in Mr Trump’s first term. President Xi Jinping has long argued that America is too polarised and overstretched to sustain its global role. One of his slogans warns of “great changes unseen in a century”. His paranoid nationalism used to seem like dystopian hyperbole. Now that Mr Trump is committing such wanton self-harm and general destruction, it looks ahead of its time.

Mr Xi has been preparing for today’s chaotic world ever since becoming China’s leader in 2012. He has urged economic and technological self-sufficiency on his country. China has reduced its vulnerability to American chokeholds, such as sanctions and export controls. Although its banks still need access to dollars, it now makes most non-bank international payments in yuan.

China’s domestic economy has unrecognised strengths. Competition and an embrace of technology mean that its industrial firms thrash Western rivals in everything from electric vehicles to the “low-altitude economy”, meaning drones and flying taxis. Viewed from China, Mr Trump’s tariffs will condemn Detroit to 1970s-style obsolescence, just as his crusade against universities will set back innovation.

One example of China’s promise is DeepSeek, which is taken as a sign that the country can innovate around America’s semiconductor embargoes. The party is comfortable with home-grown AI, and this could allow the technology to diffuse through China faster than the West, boosting productivity. That, and signs Mr Xi may have grown more tolerant of entrepreneurs, help explain why the MSCI index of Chinese shares has risen by 15% in 2025, even as American stocks have slid. Read on (Gift article).

3.China announces 34% retaliatory tariffs on US imports

China has announced duties of 34 per cent on all US imports in retaliation to Donald Trump’s tariffs, moving the world closer to a full-blown trade war as the US president vowed he would never back down.

Global stock markets extended their losses on Friday after Beijing’s statement, with the S&P 500 down 3.3 per cent and the Europe-wide Stoxx 600 4.4 per cent lower.

The country’s Ministry of Commerce said on Friday that it would be imposed on all US imported goods from April 10, a day after America’s “reciprocal” levies come into effect. Beijing’s move was accompanied by a slew of other measures, including restrictions on rare earth exports and a probe of the China subsidiary of DuPont, the US chemicals giant.

4.Trump’s tariffs will deliver a big blow to climate tech: MIT Technology Review

US president Donald Trump’s massive, sweeping tariffs sent global stock markets tumbling yesterday, setting the stage for a worldwide trade war and ratcheting up the dangers of a punishing recession.

Experts fear that the US cleantech sector is especially vulnerable to a deep downturn, which would undermine progress on reducing progress on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

5.What DeepSeek Can Teach Us About Resourcefulness: Harvard Business Review

“In January, the Chinese startup DeepSeek rattled the AI world, tech stocks, and Wall Street darling NVIDIA when it released an open-source model that was smaller, more efficient, and significantly cheaper to build than products from leading U.S. companies. DeepSeek quickly jumped to the top of app-store charts, and the moment was declared a wakeup call for western AI companies.

While the tech industry wrestles with DeepSeek’s implications, the excitement risks overshadowing its deeper and broader insights for companies and industries.

Resourcefulness, not resources or technology, is the real story and insight behind what DeepSeek achieved” Read on

6.How to Keep Your Kids Safe Online: Bloomberg

“The “stranger danger” fears of the 20th century can seem quaint compared with the horror stories kids may come across in the digital world. Before the internet, parents feared sexual predators or drug dealers having physical access to their children. Now they’re just a swipe away.

Kids are growing up online, immersed in social media, obsessed with it and, in some cases, addicted to it. More than 95% of teens in the US use social media, with one-third saying they are logged on almost constantly. The fabric of their social lives has shifted from classrooms to smartphone apps, video games and chat forums — internet spaces where it can be impossible to know who you’re really talking to. And, as Bloomberg’s new documentary Can’t Look Away demonstrates, these online environments can be dangerous, and even deadly. The film, which is streaming on Jolt and in select theaters starting April 4, follows a group of attorneys fighting to hold social media companies accountable for causing devastating harm to kids: Cases where teens were ruthlessly blackmailed by international gangs of cyber-sextortionists or sold deadly counterfeit pills by drug dealers who deliver through their bedroom windows. Read on

7.US tariff effect: Mobile device makers assembling in India may seek sops: Business Standard

Global mobile device makers assembling in India will be seeking financial incentives from the government to ensure they remain competitive amid the 27 per cent duty slapped on their exports to the US.

Otherwise, they may have to hedge their bets by shifting new capacity to other countries — where duty imposed on US exports is lower.

A top executive of a mobile company said: “Indian tariffs on components add up to 6-8 per cent of the bill of materials even after reduction in the last Union Budget. Even if a company is doing 50-50 between domestic sales and exports, half of this, that is 2-3 per cent, is a cost also imposed on the export quantity, creating an additional disability. For companies like Apple Inc, which exports bulk of its phones, it would be even higher. This disability has to be removed immediately if we want to remain competitive vis-a-vis prospective new locations.” 

India has a relative tariff advantage now over China (where duty slapped is 54 per cent) and Vietnam (where duty to the US is 46 per cent).

But in a quick response, the Vietnam Trade Ministry has requested the US administration to put on hold the planned new tariffs and go for further negotiations with them. It is planning to send a delegation to the US under deputy prime minister Ho Duc Phoc.

8.Delhi airport to start full body scanner trials in May, may cut wait time: Business Standard

Delhi airport will start trials of full body scanners in May, with the airport operator DIAL saying that the scanners will generate a standardised 2D image on a preset human avatar so that no personal images are stored in the system.

Four scanners have been procured, with two installed at Terminal 1 (T1) and two at Terminal 3 (T3). These scanners are expected to reduce the waiting time for passengers at the airport.

"The IT interface for these machines is being finalised, and upon completion of the three-to-four-month trial, a BCAS-led committee will evaluate the findings and establish a Standard Operating Procedure (SoP) for full-scale implementation," Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) said in a release on Friday.

9.Harvard’s $9 billion scramble to avoid becoming the next Columbia: Wall Street Journal

“Harvard President Alan Garber has spent the past few weeks trying to keep his school from becoming the next Columbia.

As he watched Trump pull federal funds from his school’s Ivy League peer over antisemitism concerns, and impose far-reaching demands, Garber made a flurry of moves of his own. The school dismissed leaders at its controversial center for Middle Eastern studies, reinforced intellectual diversity guidelines across programs and unwound a partnership with a university in the West Bank.

Nonetheless, Harvard now finds itself in the hot seat. On Monday, the White House targeted the university with a review of $9 billion in federal funds as part of Trump’s rapidly escalating campaign against what he views as left-wing ideology and antisemitism on campuses.

This effort has kicked into a higher gear. Princeton University said Tuesday the Trump administration is suspending “several dozen" research grants. Chris Eisgruber, Princeton’s president, said in an email to students and staffers that “the full rationale for this action is not yet clear."

In a recent Atlantic magazine essay, Eisgruber described the Trump administration’s “attack on Columbia University" as “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s."

10.China’s city-dwellers spent $41 billion on pets last year, part of a wider Asia trend.

Birth rates in much of the continent are low — in South Korea, the average woman will have just 0.75 children — but pet ownership is up.

India’s pet-care market is projected to grow nearly 60% by 2029, and China is expected to have twice as many pets as children.

The average Hong Kong owner spends around $1,250 a year on each dog or cat. One pet parent told Nikkei that animals were “more affordable and less of a lifestyle change” than children, while an analyst said the growing “humanisation” of pets — providing human-quality food and popular terms like “doggie mommy” — drives higher spending.