Economy

Tariffs lead to rush for luxury watches

Luxury watch retailers are now seeing a surge in demand in anticipation of the US imposing a 31 percent tariff on Swiss exports, Bloomberg reports.

According to John Reardon, CEO of the online platform Collectability, which focuses on used Patek Philippe watches, there is now increased pressure from customers who want to act quickly.

– Their reasoning is that a Patek Philippe is better than gold, better than bitcoin and definitely better than money in the bank, he says.
“It’s almost a nuclear attack on the economy”

Economic journalist Gabriel Mellqvist calls this week’s tariff chaos “almost a nuclear attack on the global economy.”

– This is among the strangest, toughest and potentially most destructive things I’ve seen in a very long time, he tells Ekot.

The stock market crash is partly due to Donald Trump wanting to redraw the way the global economy works, and partly because what is happening is “strange, hard to understand and unexpected”.

Stock sharks are now wondering when the upward rebound will come, but Mellqvist warns that even for “smart people” it is “easy to get burned” in situations like this.

Sources: Car giant pauses exports to the US – to be introduced on Monday

The British luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover is pausing its car exports to the US in the wake of Donald Trump’s tariffs. The Times reports.

The stop will take effect from Monday at the same time as the company investigates ways to round off the effects of the US tariffs, the newspaper writes.

– Our luxury brands have a global appeal and our business is resilient, accustomed to changing market conditions, the company said in a comment earlier this week.

Jaguar Land Rover has not yet commented on the information.

Today's stock market
54,000 billion up in smoke in Wall Street bloodbath

5.4 trillion dollars, equivalent to 54,000 billion kronor, went up in smoke in the last two days of huge decline on Wall Street. Bloomberg writes.

The S&P500 recorded its worst decline since the pandemic and closed at an 11-month low. In parallel, the technology-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange has fallen more than 20 percent from its peak and is now in a bear market, while the broad Dow Jones has moved into a correction.

Since Donald Trump took office, around 8 trillion dollars in market value has been erased, writes Reuters.

The plunge comes after a news-intensive week with Donald Trump's tariffs and not least China's countermeasures, followed by comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell that the tariffs could have a lasting effect on inflation.

Professor: Tariffs the biggest mistake since the Depression

Donald Trump's decision to impose tariffs on the rest of the world could be a worse decision for the United States than when the so-called Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was introduced during the American Depression. This is what Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel says, according to CNBC.

- I think it's the biggest political mistake in 95 years, he tells the news agency.

He believes that Trump doesn't seem to have done his homework on what went wrong with tariff policy in the 1930s and compares it to the Federal Reserve, which instead learned from the crisis.

He further describes the market reactions as "self-inflicted".