BEIJING— President Trump showed no sign Wednesday of backing down from an escalating trade confrontation with China, even as financial markets wobbled and American farmers and manufacturers warned that he was inviting a damaging commercial clash.
Hours after the Chinese government announced plans to match the president’s tariffs on $50 billion in imported Chinese goods with import levies on American soybeans, cars, and airplanes, Trump fired off a pair of bellicose tweets.
‘‘When you’re already $500 Billion DOWN, you can’t lose!’’ the president wrote in a possible reference to last year’s $566 billion US deficit in goods and services trade.
Wall Street was less sanguine. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 500 points in early trading before rebounding by midday.
Soybean prices plunged more than 5 percent as traders grappled with the possible closure of a market that bought roughly half of US exports of the commodity last year.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, meanwhile, called the investor reaction overblown and signaled that the administration may seek to resolve the trade dispute at the bargaining table. The US tariffs won’t take effect before the end of May, after a period for public comment.
‘‘Even shooting wars end with negotiations,’’ Ross told CNBC. ‘‘So it wouldn’t be surprising at all if the net outcome of all this is some sort of negotiation, whether it happens by May or some other time, that’s another whole question.’’
Farm groups Wednesday joined the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers in opposing the president’s reliance upon tariffs as a tool to change Chinese industrial policies. The administration wants China to stop forcing US companies to share their technology with Chinese partners, stealing trade secrets via cyber theft, and acquiring US high-tech companies on the open market.
Former Senator Max Baucus, who cochairs Farmers for Free Trade, said the Chinese tariffs will hurt ‘‘harvesters, processors, truck drivers, rail workers, and main street businesses that rely on a strong agricultural economy’’ along with farmers.
‘‘We urge the administration to reconsider escalating this trade war,’’ said Baucus, who served as President Obama’s ambassador to China.
The Chinese measures are not expected to have a significant impact on the broader US economy. ‘‘In isolation, 25 percent tariffs on $50B of goods is not a big deal from a macro perspective — [it] adds less than 0.1 percent to the cost structure of the economy,’’ said economist Jim O’Sullivan of High-Frequency Economics. ‘‘The issue is whether there is retaliation to the retaliation, and so on.’’
Earlier, the president blamed his predecessors for the lopsided US-China trade relationship. ‘‘We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the US. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!’’ he wrote.
