Ahead of Trump's "liberation day" plans to announce his “reciprocal” tariff policy on April 2, recent media reports have suggested a more benign approach, with Bloomberg and WSJ suggesting Trump will pursue a "targeted approach", which in turn sent stocks sharply higher on Monday. Furthermore, White House National Economic Council Chairman Kevin Hassett commented that markets are expecting “these really large tariffs on every single country” but said that “markets need to change their expectations, because it’s not everybody that cheats us on trade, it’s just a few countries and those countries are going to be seeing some tariffs.” Likewise, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated in an interview that only 15% of countries might face additional tariffs.
However, this would still likely cover nearly all US trade. As shown in the left column of the chart below, in preparation for the reciprocal tariff plan, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) requested comments on 19 trading partners, which account for 91% of US imports. Of these, 15 have trade surpluses with the US, and represent 87% of imports.
