The tariff man holds a big stick but markets aren’t convinced he’ll use it.  President Donald Trump signed off on reciprocal tariffs on Thursday with a catch: Implementation won’t happen until at least April.

U.S. President Donald Trump has tasked his economics team with devising plans for reciprocal tariffs on every country that taxes U.S. imports, raising the risk of a global trade war with American friends and foes.

President Trump said on Friday that he planned to move forward with tariffs on foreign cars on April 2, but did not specify how much the tariffs would be or which nations could be targeted.

The biggest foreign supplier of cars was Mexico ($49 billion), followed by Japan ($40 billion), South Korea ($37 billion), Canada ($28 billion) and Germany ($25 billion).

4.8%. That’s how much the U.S.’ weighted average tariff rate would be if Trump implemented the country-level strategy, Deutsche Bank economists led by Justin Weidner estimated in a Monday note. That’s a 3.3 percentage-point increase from the 1.5% effective rate U.S. imports had in 2022, according to the World Bank.

Since the 1960s, tariffs — or import taxes — have emerged from negotiations between dozens of countries. Trump wants to seize the process. “Obviously, it disrupts the way that things have been done for a very long time,