A year after President Donald Trump declared his “liberation day” and imposed sweeping tariffs on imports, kicking off a wave of economic and political uncertainty, some companies are still feeling the effects.

While some industries have emerged largely unscathed — having weathered twists and turns of several tariff iterations — others, such as retail, automotive, consumer packaged goods and pharmaceuticals, are navigating a new reality in global supply chains.

“Leadership at U.S. corporations really had to think about where we buy from versus whether we can import or not,” said Venky Ramesh, a supply chain expert with AlixPartners. “Around 80% to 85% of the costs were absorbed domestically, meaning either the U.S. corporations had to take the hit, or they passed it on to the customers, or a mix of both.”

On April 2, 2025, in the White House’s Rose Garden, Trump announced broad country-by-country tariffs, as well as a 10% baseline levy on countries that weren’t specifically listed in that declaration. Those tariff policies fluctuated wildly over the following months as Trump made deals and walked back some of the most extreme duties.

With ever-changing trade and tariff policies, companies have been forced to be more flexible and diversify their supply chains over the past year. Moving operations out of countries such as China, Vietnam or Mexico meant import cost savings, but for many industries, it was a tall task.

Ramesh said he saw clients in the first few months making “aggressive” changes to get ahead of the tariff costs, but because those policies kept shifting, companies begin to move slower and invest resources into scenario modeling.

“Moving supplier bases cannot happen overnight,” Ramesh said. “I think what companies are doing is they’re taking it gradually, so they want to make sure that they are well-diversified.”

On Feb. 20, the Supreme Court ruled that the country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, or IEEPA, were unconstitutional. But hours after the ruling, Trump announced a new “global tariff” rate of 10% under a separate statute, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, for a period of 150 days. He later said he would increase global tariffs to 15%.

Meanwhile, those imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 — intended to target specific imports that threaten national security — remain in place. Section 232 tariffs largely affected imports of steel, semiconductors, aluminum and other products.

Still, Ramesh said, overall imports into the U.S. in 2025 were actually higher than in the previous year, especially as companies pulled forward inventory in the first few months of the year.

Ultimately, he said, he believes the past year of tariffs has culturally shifted the way U.S. companies operate.

“The things that would stick are supply chain being a very, very critical component of any company. I think that has really changed over the last…

Treasury yields fell on Wednesday as the prospect of a resolution to the Iran conflict lifted investor sentiment.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell more than 2 basis points to 4.285%. The 2-year yield dropped more than 3 basis points to 3.762%, while the 30-year Treasury yield was down less than a basis point at 4.886%.

One basis point is equal to 0.01%, and yields and prices move in opposite directions.

The moves come after President Donald Trump said Tuesday that American forces would leave Iran in “two or three weeks,” adding that the U.S. would end its war “whether we have a deal or not.”

Tensions thawed on Tuesday, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump told aides he was willing to end the war even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed for now. Later, the New York Post reported that the President believes the Iran war will likely end soon and other nations will handle the Strait.

U.S. equities posted their best daily performance since May in the prior trading day as investors were buoyed by the developments. The blue-chip Dow added more than 1,100 points, or about 2.5%. The S&P 500 advanced 2.9%, while the Nasdaq Composite jumped 3.8%.

Elsewhere on Wednesday, traders will be watching February’s retail sales report, ADP private sector employment data for March, and March’s ISM manufacturing indicators.

— CNBC’s Lisa Kailai Han also contributed to this report.

U.S. Treasury yields edged lower on Tuesday morning, as investors reassessed the outlook for Federal Reserve interest rates and continued to monitor developments in the Middle East.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell more than 3 basis points to 4.307%. Yields on the 2-year and 30-year Treasurys fell by more than 4 basis points and more than 1 basis point at 3.779% and 4.892%, respectively.

One basis point is equal to 0.01%, and yields and prices move in opposite directions.

The U.S.-Iran war continues to hold the attention of investors across the globe. Elevated oil prices are fueling both inflation concerns and recessionary fears, thereby clouding the outlook for monetary policy trajectories.

Money markets are now overwhelmingly pricing in zero rate cuts from the Federal Reserve for the rest of the year, according to the CME’s FedWatch tool. Last week, futures traders briefly pushed the probability of a rate increase by the end of 2026 to 52%.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Monday that he sees inflation expectations as grounded despite rising energy prices so the central bank doesn’t need to respond with higher interest rates.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday evening that Trump told aides he was willing to end U.S. military hostilities against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remained largely closed.

The waterway, a critical shipping route, has essentially been closed for the duration of the conflict, causing a supply glut in the oil market that has sent prices skyrocketing.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Al Jazeera in an interview published Monday that Washington’s objectives in Iran would take “weeks, not months” to achieve.

Asia-Pacific markets opened lower Tuesday as the conflict in the Middle East keeps investors jittery, with crude oil prices continuing to rise.

U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his threat on Monday, saying that the U.S. would destroy Iran’s electricity-generating plants, oil wells and Kharg Island, if the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz remains closed and no peace deal is reached to end the war.

His remarks came as the Iran war entered its fifth week and as the Trump administration weighs sending in ground forces to seize Kharg Island, a major fuel hub which facilitates 90% of Iran’s crude exports.

Shipping traffic through the Hormuz waterway, through which a fifth of the global seaborne oil used to transit before the conflict, has virtually ground to a halt since U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28.

The West Texas Intermediate rose more than 3% to settle just below $103 a barrel on Monday, pushing above the $100 level for the first time since 2022. May futures for the International benchmark Brent crude rose 0.19%, or 21 cents, to close at $112.78 per barrel. WTI was last up 2.8% at 105.8.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 tumbled 0.12% in early Asia trade.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 0.84% while broad-based Topix dropped 0.57%.

South Korea’s blue-chip Kospi declined 2.4% and the small-cap Kosdaq slipped 0.77%.

Hong Kong Hang Seng index futures were at 24,683, compared with the index’s last close of 24,750.8.

Managed future strategies are gaining renewed attention as investors look for new sources of returns from the market at a time when both stocks and bonds are under pressure as a result of the U.S.-Iran war and the risk of 1970s-style stagflation.

These strategies, which are typically run by commodity trading advisors, use systematic models to trade future contracts across different asset classes. Rather than focus on short-term market moves in traditional asset classes, they aim to capture broader trends that unfold over months. The ability to adapt to changing market conditions, and their performance back in 2022, has made managed futures funds increasingly relevant in 2026.

In 2022, when the S&P 500 Index fell around 18% and the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index was down about 13%, managed future strategies were up 20%.

“That’s meaningful outperformance in an environment when stocks and bonds are under pressure,” Nate Geraci, NovaDius president, said on CNBC’s “ETF Edge” earlier this week.

Andrew Beer, managing member at DBi, which manages the largest managed futures ETF, the iMGP DBi Managed Futures Strategy ETF (DBMF), said on “ETF Edge” that the uncertainty around inflation and interest rates, and the volatile geopolitical backdrop, are a good match for the managed futures approach, which can take long or short positions and have the flexibility to respond to different trends across the markets.

Managed futures ETFs remain a relatively small category, collectively holding around $6.5 billion in assets, according to ETFAction.com. Within that space, the iMGP DBi Managed Futures Strategy ETF has attracted about $1 billion in flows this year.

The use of the managed futures approach with ETFs allows more investors to access a strategy that been associated with the world of hedge funds historically, but in a more liquid and transparent structure.

“We’re leveraging the work of largest hedge funds, and trying to be more efficient, pick up what they are doing,” Beer said. “We thrive with changes over 3, 6, 9, 12 months, not Monday to Thursday,” he said.

“Certainly, the [ETF] industry is going to be launching additional managed futures products along with other hedge funds strategies,” Geraci said during the podcast portion of “ETF Edge.”

Geraci said one clear signal that this approach is likely to see more interest from retail investors is three of the biggest asset managers getting into the space with their own branded managed futures ETFs: BlackRock, Invesco and Fidelity Investments.

“They all entered the market in the past year and that is a sign of real investor demand going forward,” Geraci said. “The interest is there, especially given the backdrop of this market environment,” he added.

Still, managed future ETFs remain more complex than regular stock and bond investments, and investors need to understand that while their performance…

Google’s latest research which claims to make AI models more efficient is putting pressure on memory stocks, with investors concerned the breakthrough could see a slowdown in chip demand.

On Thursday, shares of the world’s two biggest memory chipmakers, SK Hynix and Samsung, fell 6% and nearly 5%, respectively in South Korea. Japanese flash memory company Kioxia dropped nearly 6%. These moves followed falls in Sandisk and Micron in the U.S. on Wednesday. Both companies were lower in U.S. premarket trade on Thursday.

Alphabet‘s Google on Tuesday unveiled TurboQuant, a new compression method that it says could reduce the amount of memory required to run large language models by six times. The technique focuses on reducing the key value cache, which stores the past calculations of an AI model so it doesn’t have to run them again.

The technique is aimed at making AI models more efficient, a major goal of the leading labs.

Investors fear that this could reduce the demand for AI memory chips, which have been a critical component to train up huge LLMs from companies like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, called the research “Google’s DeepSeek,” referencing the efficiency breakthroughs made by Chinese AI firm DeepSeek last year which caused a massive sell-off in tech stocks.

“So much more room to optimize AI inference for speed, memory usage, power consumption, and multi-tenant utilization,” he said in a post on X on Wednesday.

However, Ray Wang, a memory analyst at SemiAnalysis, said that the research from Google won’t necessarily lead to the need for fewer chips. The value cache is “a key bottleneck to address to have better models and hardware performance,” he said.

Wang said it will be “hard to avoid higher usage of memory” as a result of improving model performance.

“When you address a bottleneck, you are going to help AI hardware to be more capable. And the training model will be more powerful in the future. When the model becomes more powerful, you require better hardware to support it,” Wang told CNBC.

European stocks fell on Friday after U.S. President Donald Trump extended the ongoing hiatus of attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 dropped 0.8% shortly after 9:35 a.m. London time (6:35 a.m. E.T). The FTSE 100 opened 0.3% lower, while France’s CAC 40 fell 0.5%. Germany’s DAX opened down 1%. 

European bourses resumed their declines from the previous session, having closed lower on Thursday as investors struggled to decipher mixed messages on the status of Middle East peace talks.

On Thursday evening, President Trump said he would extend a hiatus on attacks on Iran’s energy facilities by 10 days to April 6, to allow more time for negotiations.

“As per Iranian Government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “Talks are ongoing and, despite erroneous statements to the contrary by the Fake News Media, and others, they are going very well. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The President also claimed Iran had allowed 10 oil tankers to pass through the strait this week as a “present” to the U.S., though Tehran has not publicly commented on the matter.

Asian markets fell overnight, while U.S. stock futures rose slightly.

In corporate news, drink makers Pernod Ricard and Brown-Forman, which owns whisky brand Jack Daniels, have reportedly begun merger discussions, amid a prolonged downturn for the alcohol industry. 

Both companies announced statements confirming talks, in a move that would combine the world’s second-largest spirits maker with the ‌largest producer of American whiskey. Pernod shares were last seen trading 2% higher upon the news.

Elsewhere in Europe, the meeting of G7 foreign ministers in France enters its second day on Friday. The wars in Iran and Ukraine will be top of the agenda, while South Africa, which was supposed to attend as an observing nation, says France withdrew its G7 invitation after the US threatened to boycott.

— CNBC’s Leonie Kidd also contributed to this report.

Oil prices fell on Wednesday after U.S. President Donald Trump said that Washington and Tehran are “in negotiations right now” and indicated Iran is keen to reach a peace agreement, despite the Islamic Republic denying any direct talks with the U.S.

International benchmark Brent crude futures declined 4.52% to $98.71 per barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were also down 3.72% at $88.89 per barrel.

Speaking from the Oval Office, Trump said he had pulled back from his earlier threat to launch strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure “based on the fact we’re negotiating.”

“They’re talking to us, and they’re talking sense,” Trump said when asked to elaborate on the shift.

Later Tuesday, The New York Times reported, citing two unnamed officials, that the U.S. had sent Iran a 15-point proposal aimed at ending the war.

According to the report, it remains unclear how widely the proposal, delivered through Pakistan, has been circulated among Iranian officials. It is also uncertain whether Israel, which is carrying out attacks on Iran alongside the U.S., would back the plan.

Iran’s top joint military command spokesperson signaled that oil markets will remain volatile, warning prices won’t normalize until regional stability is secured under its military control, Reuters reported.

The current disruption to oil supplies marks the largest shock in decades when measured as a share of global supply, Goldman Sachs co-head of global commodities research Daan Struyven said in a call with the media, underscoring the unusually high uncertainty facing markets.

The bank noted that near-term price movements are being driven less by changes in the base case outlook and more by shifts in the perceived probability of worst-case scenarios. Crude is effectively trading on a geopolitical risk premium as investors hedge against prolonged disruptions and critically low inventories, Goldman said.

The bank’s base case assumes flows through the Strait of Hormuz to normalize in April over a four-week period.

Shares of India’s HDFC Bank slid 5% Thursday after Atanu Chakraborty, its part‑time chairman, resigned after flagging governance and ethical concerns within the institution.

During an investor call on Thursday, interim part‑time chairman, Keki Mistry said that Chakraborty had not provided the board with any evidence or details of the alleged unethical practices.

“Certain happenings and practices within the bank, that I have observed over last two years, are not in congruence with my personal Values and Ethics,” Chakraborty said in his resignation letter.

Foreign institutional investors own over 47% stake in India’s largest private sector lender. The Government of Singapore and Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global are among the top foreign investors in HDFC Bank, owning nearly 2.3% and over 1.2% stake, respectively.

The middle and junior levels of the organization should “form the core of a reimaged organization,” Chakraborty said in his resignation letter dated March 17, which was submitted to HDFC Bank during late market hours Wednesday.

Mistry’s appointment is a “strong firefighting move,” said Deven Choksey, founder and managing director of wealth management firm DRChoksey FinServ, in a note on Thursday.

He warned that HDFC shares may see “significant selling pressure,” advising investors to avoid “bottom‑fishing” until governance concerns are addressed.

HDFC Bank and India’s banking system regulator, Reserve Bank of India, did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

As of Wednesday, HDFC Bank’s market cap stood at 13.08 trillion rupees ($140 billion), higher than the 9.95 trillion‑rupee valuation of State Bank of India, the country’s largest public-sector lender, according to LSEG data.