• President Trump is set to announce new tariffs on April 2, potentially escalating trade tensions with key allies and further impacting market volatility. Broad-based sanctions on “all countries” are now on the table. Analysts predict sector-wide tariffs averaging 15% across major U.S. trading partners, with potential recessionary and inflationary consequences.

‘Liberation Day’ is upon us. On Wednesday, April 2, the Trump administration is expected to make a raft of new tariff announcements, potentially escalating growing trade tensions with some of America’s closest allies.

Already, President Trump has caused market volatility by imposing tariffs on neighboring nations Canada and Mexico and two 10% tariffs on China. Hikes have also been placed on all autos and steel and aluminum products.

But he’s not done yet: This week, the Oval Office warned that further sanctions will begin on “all countries” rather than a specific list.

Markets are, perhaps unsurprisingly, volatile ahead of the announcement, which could escalate a trade war. At the time of writing the S&P500 is down 2.4% over the past five days, while the Dow Jones is also down 1.4% over the same period.

Much of this selloff happened over the weekend, when President Trump made his threat on “all” nations as well as stoking geopolitical tensions with criticism of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Ahead of this week’s announcement, here’s a roundup of President Trump’s policy threats and Wall Street reaction.

The EU

While President Trump has previously said he likes the “nice little European countries” that make up the EU, he has also erroneously claimed the trade bloc was set up with the purpose of destroying the U.S.

In October, President Trump highlighted America’s trade deficit with the EU regarding autos—an issue already addressed by his vehicle tax—and the “farm products” that he said the EU doesn’t accept from the States.

They will have to pay a “big price,” Trump said at the time.

This threat has been heightened even within the last week, with President Trump saying that if the EU and Canada began working on an undisclosed deal to benefit themselves while hurting American interests, they will face sanctions “far larger than currently planned.”

As such, the EU—America’s second-largest import partner—could represent the largest shift in trade policy announced on April 2.

Previously, a Deutsche Bank survey of 400 analysts found that the medium-term expectation for EU tariffs would settle at around 18%, though this could be after a period of negotiation with hikes that initially started higher.

“We expect the administration to use a broader set of metrics to come up with country-specific tariff numbers, including the magnitude of trade imbalances, tariff differentials, VAT, digital service taxes and non-tariff barriers,” UBS economist Arend Kapteyn wrote in a note seen by Fortune this morning.

“Given that the time needed to analyze all this properly is not consistent with the April 1 deadline, this week is likely just the starting point of negotiations,” Kapteyn continued.

UBS’s base case is a 15% tariff on America’s 15 largest trade partners.

China

Despite a 60% tariff on China being the major talking point of President Trump’s campaign, so far, Bejing has only faced two hikes of 10% apiece.

Of course, this has been framed as a sanction against the flow of deadly drugs—such as fentanyl—coming into the U.S. from China. However, President Trump’s bid to rebalance trade with China could result in further sanctions this week.

“We had penciled in 60% tariffs for China because that was what Trump campaigned on, but there is clearly scope for tariffs to be lower,” Kapteyn added.

Having announced its own reciprocal tariffs, China has fared remarkably well despite the growing tensions with the U.S.

Bank of America economists Helen Qiao and Anna Zhou identified a number of factors for the boost in market sentiment. In a note seen by Fortune, the pair wrote: “China still managed to post a 2.3% yoy increase in exports in Jan-Feb … But even before the boost from macro data strength … investor sentiment had already recovered.

“A confluence of factors are at play, including: 1) a technology breakthrough (i.e. the introduction of DeepSeek-R1 and the rise of humanoid robots); 2) the unprecedented success of Chinese animation movie Ne Zha 2; and 3) the symposium between President Xi and tech leaders on February 17 that provided a measure of reassurance around incentive improvement.”

Russia

President Trump has also threatened further economic sanctions against Russia if the U.S.-brokered ceasefire talks between Putin’s nation and Ukraine do not go ahead.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” President Trump told NBC News on Sunday.

He doubled down: “That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25% tariff on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil.”

A universal tariff?

Thus far, Trump has targeted specific countries with their own tariff levels rather than announcing a blanket hike for all imports into the U.S.

A so-called universal tariff has been highlighted as potentially recessionary and inflationary by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, but it is looking increasingly likely with Trump’s talk of an “all countries” policy.

Over the weekend, Goldman Sachs upped its tariff assumptions, per a note from economists Ronnie Walker, Alec Phillips, and David Mericle.

“We expect President Trump to announce reciprocal tariffs that average 15% across all U.S. trading partners on April 2, although we expect product and country exclusions to ultimately whittle the addition to the average U.S. tariff rate down to 9pp,” the note seen by Fortune reads.

The trio also increased their core PCE inflation forecast by 0.5pp to 3.5% year over year and shifted their recession expectation from 20% to 35%.

In late January, Thierry Wizman, global FX and rates strategist at Macquarie, suggested that sector-level universal tariffs are likelier than threats against allied nations because “permanent sector-level universal tariffs are more consistent with WTO rules than country-specific tariffs, and so are likelier to withstand legal challenge.”

He added in the note seen by Fortune: “To Trump, universal tariffs also serve the public-policy imperative of raising revenue for the U.S. government, thus perhaps justifying corporate tax rates to be cut, an important agenda item for the administration.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Providing ubiquitous desktop software for decades, Microsoft has come in for jibes, mockery and even loathing even as it has helped millions of people get things done.

Every design decision is felt around the world for better or worse — often staying with people for years as a fond memory or a meme.

Here are a few of the ways Microsoft has marked computing culture:

Blue Screen of Death

A fixture since the very first versions of Windows — if mercifully much rarer these days — the Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD, is displayed when Microsoft’s operating system encounters a fatal error in a programme, or the application becomes unresponsive.

It has most commonly been a full blue screen with white text — originally composed by Steve Ballmer, who later went on to head the company — warning of the problem.

Some versions of the screen include error codes to help power users figure out what has gone wrong.

More recent editions of Windows have added a sad-face smiley in an apparent bid to sympathise.

While it has often offered the option to continue working by closing the programme or restarting the computer, many users have found the only way to escape it is by manually turning the machine off and on again.

Blissful background

In a breath of fresh air from previous versions of Windows, users booting up the 2001 “XP” edition were presented with a vision of lush, sun-dappled hills under a vivid blue sky.

For many who grew up using computers in the 1990s and 2000s, the idyllic desktop background now recalls a simpler time of after-school gaming or using still-novel online chat programmes to talk with friends.

Wine industry photographer Chuck O’Rear took what has been called “the world’s most-viewed picture” in 1996, after driving by a spot in California’s Sonoma County where vines had been torn up to fight the phylloxera pest.

Dubbed “Bliss”, the background can still be spotted in the wild today on systems that have not been updated in a while, and has spawned endless memes, parodies and now AI imaginings of what the rest of the scene might look like.

Inviting melodies

2001 was far from the beginning of Microsoft’s attempts to craft a soothing environment for PC users.

The 1995 edition of the operating system played ethereal startup chimes as the machine laboured into life.

Windows 95’s enchanting startup sound was crafted by electronic music legend Brian Eno, who told news site SFGate in 1996 that the piece was like “a tiny little jewel”.

Commissioned to make it “inspiring, universal, blah-bah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” Eno composed 84 clips before selecting the best — which was twice as long as the original three-and-a-quarter-second brief.

‘Helpful’ Clippy

Long before ChatGPT was helping to write essays or generate emails, Microsoft tried to back up users of its Office productivity suite with smart software.

From the late 1990s, an “Office Assistant” interactive animated character would pop up to offer help with the task it believed was at hand.

The best-remembered is chirpy paperclip “Clippy”, whose often mistaken assumption that Word users needed help writing letters spawned a million memes.

Assistant emerged from research suggesting that users experienced interactions with a computer like working with human colleagues.

It was a “truly tragic misunderstanding” of the study, interaction designer Alan Cooper later said.

“If people are going to react to computers as though they’re humans, the one thing you don’t have to do is anthropomorphise them,” he told broadcaster G4TV.

Nevertheless, nostalgics can find Clippy as the face of a ChatGPT-powered assistant for Windows 11 built by developers FireCube.

Secret flight simulator

Microsoft produces a highly detailed and well-loved series of games simply called “Flight Simulator” with recreations of real locations and aircraft.

Office workers without a joystick or high-end graphics card, though, could escape into a bizarre neon-tinged hilly landscape that they could fly around using only the mouse via a series of hidden inputs in Excel 97.

The scene, which also included the credits for the spreadsheet programme, is just one of dozens of hidden “Easter eggs” scattered through the company’s software over the decades.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator.
• The big story: Markets fall worldwide as tariff “Liberation Day” approaches.
• The markets: It’s grim out there.
• Analyst notes from UBS, Bank of America, EY, and Apollo on tariffs and the economy.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. The performance of an IPO can reflect broad market sentiment or narrow investor enthusiasm for the company being listed—or a bit of both. There were a lot of eyes on CoreWeave’s Nasdaq debut on Friday, which closed flat at its scaled-back IPO price of $40 a share. Some saw the underwhelming performance of the Nvidia-backed AI cloud-computing provider as a bad sign for tech IPOs and AI, while others, including my colleague Jeremy Kahn, believe the reaction to CoreWeave reflects the challenges of being CoreWeave. 

Maybe it’s a bit of both. I spoke with CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator on Friday about the New Jersey-based company’s much-scrutinized debut. He said they had scaled back the price and size of the stock offer because of “broader market headwinds,” describing the IPO as “a means to an end” for the company to grow.

“It puts us on the path towards what we need to accomplish as a business,” he said. “A little bigger, a little smaller, a little higher, a little lower. That’s not going to matter. What’s going to matter is: how do we execute on our business?”

That is a topic of much debate. Being a public company could drive down the cost of accessing debt markets, but CoreWeave’s capital-intensive model and existing debt burden unnerves some investors. The company has borrowed $8 billion to build out data centers that run graphics processing units (GPUs) provided by Nvidia. Servicing that debt is likely to cost at least $1 billion this year, which puts the $1.5 billion it raised through Friday’s IPO in perspective.

CoreWeave also relies heavily on one customer—Microsoft, which accounted for 62% of its revenue last year. Besides that, the company is betting heavily on a class of Nvidia chips that could be disrupted by newer models. And then there’s the question of whether we’re in a data center bubble, which Intrator dismisses.

“There’s a divergence between what the capital markets and what the media is thinking, and what I am feeling down in the trenches. What I am feeling is relentless demand,” he says. “I know what my clients want. I know the type of infrastructure they need. I know the type of scale that they’re requesting, and I build for them. Over time, I will be able to generate enormous value for my investors. I don’t really care where it is today or tomorrow or the day after.”

You can read my full interview with Intrator here. 

More news below.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com