Mr. Bolten’s statement was the fourth time this year the group commented on the threat of new tariffs against the country’s major trading partners.

On March 12, the Business Roundtable’s survey of 150 chief executives, polled in late February and early March when Mr. Trump threatened tariffs against Canada and Mexico, showed growing pessimism about the United States’ economic outlook. The survey, called the Business Roundtable C.E.O. Economic Outlook Index, fell in the first quarter to 7 points, roughly where it was in mid-2024. Expectations for hiring, capital investment and sales all fell.

Chuck Robbins, the chair of the group and the chief executive of Cisco, said last month that not all tariffs were harmful, but that businesses wanted certainty about the levies so they could adapt if needed.

“Markets want clarity,” he said in an interview with Punchbowl News. “Companies want clarity, and the fear is that companies begin to do the classic, you know, ‘I’m just going to pause investments now until we understand this a little bit better.’”

The European Union offered Monday to drop its tariffs on American cars and industrial goods to zero if the United States did the same. But Mr. Navarro criticized the bloc for its value-added taxes and restrictions on American meat exports, as well as systematically higher tariffs.

“You steal from the American people every which way is possible,” Mr. Navarro said. “So, don’t just say we’re going to lower our tariffs.”

Mr. Navarro also targeted Vietnam, which has appealed to the president in recent days to have its tariffs reduced. He accused Vietnam of dumping products into U.S. markets, engaging in intellectual property theft and killing industries like shrimp, kitchen cabinets and others.

“When they come to us and say, we’ll go to zero tariffs, that means nothing to us, because it’s the non-tariff cheating that matters,” Mr. Navarro said.

In the interview, Mr. Navarro said that tax cuts were forthcoming, as well as other benefits for Americans, like deregulation, lower energy prices, lower interest rates and the restructuring of manufacturing.

“We’re going to get to a place where America makes stuff again, real wages are going to be up, profits are going to be up,” he said, adding, “the market’s going to find a bottom.” Stock markets fell the first half of the trading day on Monday, following two days of punishing losses last week.

He was also asked about Elon Musk’s very public criticism of tariffs and of Mr. Navarro specifically over the weekend. Responding to a social-media post praising Mr. Navarro, Mr. Musk on Saturday mocked Mr. Navarro’s Ivy League degree as useless, and then said Mr. Navarro had not “built” anything.

On Monday, Mr. Navarro said that Mr. Musk was “not a car manufacturer” but “a car assembler,” mentioning that Tesla’s plant in Texas imported batteries, electronics, tires and other parts. “He wants the cheap foreign parts, and we understand that,” he said.

Copper prices surged this year, and reached a high after Mr. Trump said his administration was investigating whether tariffs might be necessary to reduce the United States’ reliance on copper imports. Copper buyers rushed to purchase the metal before any tariffs took effect.

Then last week, Mr. Trump imposed “reciprocal” tariffs on most countries, terrifying many investors and business executives because of the tariffs’ potential to sharply slow the economy and perhaps even cause a recession. As a result, copper prices plunged, and are now down nearly 20 percent from last month’s high.

“With growth in the U.S. likely to slow on the back of tariffs, and China already struggling to revive its economy, demand for copper and other industrial metals is likely to weaken,” said Ewa Manthey, a commodities strategist at ING.

Copper is used widely, including in cars, appliances, electronics and many industries that produce and consume electricity. Last year, the United States imported about half the copper it used, excluding scrap, according to ING.

Prices of other metals are also under pressure.

Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum imports went into effect last month. But the prices of these metals have weakened in recent days as fears of a recession have intensified. The prices of “hot rolled coil” steel have fallen more than 10 percent since last month, and aluminum is down nearly 15 percent.

“If trade tensions intensify and we see more retaliatory measures, this will add to the bearish sentiment for industrial metals,” Ms. Manthey said.

Separately, the Trump administration said on Monday that it would conduct a new national security review of the proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel, a Japanese steel producer. The Biden administration had performed its own review and blocked the deal in January.

In a statement on Monday, U.S. Steel said, “We look forward to continuing to work closely with President Trump and his administration to finalize this significant and important investment, which will preserve existing jobs, create new jobs, enhance national security and secure a bright future for American manufacturing.”

“We’re not looking at that,” Mr. Trump said, when asked about a possible pause on his tariffs. “We’re going to have one shot at this and no other president is going to do what I’m doing.”

Mr. Trump began the day by drawing new battle lines over his so-called reciprocal tariffs, which he plans to impose on certain countries after midnight on Wednesday. The taxes, which can reach as high as 46 percent for some nations, will snap into effect just days after the president imposed a minimum 10 percent levy on nearly every U.S. trading partner.

Mr. Trump specifically targeted China, which announced last week it would match the United States by imposing a retaliatory 34 percent tax on imports from America. In a post on Truth Social, the president demanded that Beijing rescind its retribution or face an additional 50 percent U.S. tariff beginning April 9. He also threatened to halt any further negotiations.

The escalation could bring the U.S. tariff on Chinese goods to 104 percent, though for some products, the rate is likely to be much higher because of levies that date back to Mr. Trump’s first term. Taken together, it could prove costly for importers bringing in clothing, cellphones, chemicals and machinery from China. American consumers last year bought $440 billion of goods from China, making it the second-largest source of U.S. imports after Mexico.

Mr. Trump coupled his ultimatum to China with a pledge to issue punishing, additional tariffs on other U.S. trading partners if they similarly try to rebuff his policies. But his attacks did not appear to dissuade some opponents, including the European Union, where officials prepared to circulate a list of U.S. products that they could soon subject to retaliation.

With global tensions rising, Mr. Trump’s strategy triggered another day of unease on Wall Street. The S&P 500 fell 0.2 percent, now almost 18 percent below its mid-February peak. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index, which also saw dramatic swings throughout the day, ended slightly higher.

In a sign of investor frustration over the tariffs, an erroneous news report earlier in the day, suggesting that the president might pause his trade war, sparked an immediate rally — only to see stocks just as quickly plummet again, after the White House made clear no such pause was in the offing.

Still, administration officials appeared to leave open the door for negotiations that could ultimately defuse the trade war, citing the fact that more than 50 countries — including, most recently, Israel, Japan and Vietnam — had approached the U.S. government in recent days to strike deals. After visiting with the president at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged Monday that his country would “eliminate the trade deficit with the United States,” while reducing other trade barriers “fairly quickly.”

But White House officials have sought to set a high bar for what the president is willing to accept, marking a shift in tone after Mr. Trump and his aides initially signaled they would not haggle over tariffs at all.

“If they come to us with really great deals that advantage American manufacturing and American farmers, I’m sure he’ll listen,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said in an interview on Fox News.

Mr. Hassett said some nations had proposed “some deals that are great,” but added of the president: “After decades and decades of mistreating American workers, it’s going to be tough to get him to decide to really come to the table and sign on the dotted line.”

Peter Navarro, a senior White House trade adviser, specifically said that other nations needed to do more than lower their own tariffs to secure relief from the United States. Appearing on CNBC, he cited a need to reduce “cheating” and other barriers that restrict American goods in foreign markets.

And Stephen Miran, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said offers by foreign countries “would be welcomed by the United States.” He added at an event in Washington that the president had been “very clear that we want increased access to foreign markets that would boost our exports.”

With seemingly no end to the trade war in sight, economists once again were left to grapple with the prospect that high tariffs could raise prices on consumers, slow U.S. growth and tip the country into a recession. Tariffs are taxes on imports, which businesses may struggle to afford, potentially resulting in those firms passing on the new costs to customers.

Jay Foreman, the chief executive of toy company Basic Fun, called the president’s new threat against China “unhinged.”

Mr. Foreman said he had just initiated a complete hold on all shipments of his products from Asia. “I cannot risk putting any product on the water that might incur, at this point, a 54 percent to 104 percent tariff,” he said. “It’s one thing to try to absorb or pass along 10 percent to 20 percent, but 54 percent to 104 percent, it’s impossible. The consumer will just shut down.”

Jeanna Smialek and Danielle Kaye contributed reporting.

But in a sign of the precarious nature of the markets right now, an unsubstantiated online report spiked shares sharply, albeit briefly, and continued to climb after CNBC and Reuters relayed the claim. The White House quickly responded saying that the report was “FAKE NEWS,” and CNBC and Reuters issued statements correcting the record.

Stocks fell back down after those corrections. Still, the fallout continued to reverberate on Monday, and became a cautionary tale of the risk of using information drawn from the fast-moving echo chamber of social media without first confirming the news independently.

Asked earlier in the day about the possibility of a pause on imposing the expansive tariffs announced by President Trump last week, Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said on Fox News: “I think the president is going to decide what the president is going to decide.”

Walter Bloomberg, an influential X account that is unaffiliated with Bloomberg News, amplified a post on social media claiming Mr. Hassett had said Mr. Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs.

Minutes after the Walter Bloomberg account’s post, Carl Quintanilla, a CNBC anchor, read a headline on air echoing the reports about Hassett. “I think we can go with this headline,” Mr. Quintanilla said, without attributing the news. A person with knowledge of the editorial process at the network said Mr. Quintanilla had read a CNBC headline that was circulated prematurely by mistake.

After that, Reuters flashed a headline, citing CNBC.

The Walter Bloomberg account later deleted the post. In a direct message on X, the account said to The New York Times that the post had originated minutes earlier from another X account. “Given the market movement — plus 4.5 percent — I deemed the headline reliable and posted it at 10:13,” the Walter Bloomberg account said in the direct message. “A few minutes later, Reuters picked up the story, citing CNBC.”

CNBC issued a correction soon after mentioning the potential pause, saying its “aired unconfirmed information in a banner,” adding that its reporters “quickly made a correction on air.” Reuters also issued a correction, saying its report relied on a headline from CNBC. “Reuters has withdrawn the incorrect report and regrets its error,” it said in a statement.

Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh’s interim leader, wrote on Facebook that if granted, Bangladesh would use the three months “to substantially increase US exports to Bangladesh.” Mr. Yunus said that he had promised Mr. Trump in the letter that Bangladesh would “take all necessary actions to fully support your trade agenda.”

Mohiuddin Rubel, the director of a Bangladeshi trade association, said that American “buyers have already requested that shipments be put on hold until further notice,” and that some are trying to force their suppliers in Bangladesh to absorb the costs. The industry employs roughly four million people in the world’s 10th most populous country.

More than 80 percent of Bangladesh’s exports are ready-made garments. Until this week, the United States was buying almost half.

Kevin Hassett, the head of the White House National Economic Council, said on Sunday that the White House had received offers from about 50 countries interested in making deals to ease Mr. Trump’s expansive tariffs. But Mr. Hassett sought to set a high bar for the sort of deal that the administration would be willing to accept.

“After decades and decades of mistreating American workers, it’s going to be tough to get him to decide to really come to the table and sign on the dotted line,” he said of the president.

Tony Romm contributed to this report.

Here is what to know about a bear market.

What is a bear market?

A bear market is a Wall Street term for a sustained market downturn, when a stock index closes 20 percent from its last peak.

The 20 percent threshold signals investor pessimism about the future of the economy.

Are we in a bear market now?

The S&P 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, opened lower on Monday. The index was already down 17.4 percent from its last high, on Feb. 19, and if it closes Monday’s trading with a loss of at least 3.1 percent, that would tip it into a bear market.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley have warned that an even steeper drop is possible. Goldman Sachs on Monday slashed its forecast for economic growth, citing a growing risk of a U.S. recession next year.

The Nasdaq Composite Index, as well as the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies that are more vulnerable to the economic outlook, are already in a bear market.

This sounds ominous. What should I do with my money?

A market decline can offer opportunities for investors with long horizons. Investing in diversified, low-cost index funds has been a successful strategy over the years, through bull markets and bears.

But given the deepening concern that Mr. Trump’s trade agenda could set off a severe economic downturn, volatility and uncertainty are high. People with shorter investment timelines, as well as those nearing retirement, often shift more assets into bonds, which have historically shown greater resilience during downturns.

When was the last bear market, and how long does one last?

The U.S. stock market has always recovered from declines, usually within a couple of years. In early 2020, the outbreak of the coronavirus set off global shutdowns, causing a short, sharp bear market. The Federal Reserve intervened, and markets regained their losses in six months. In late 2021, fears of surging inflation leading to sharply higher interest rates pulled the S&P into a bear market in early 2022, which lasted for much of the year.

The S&P has entered a bear market 15 times since 1929. Bear markets have lasted 18.9 months on average, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indices.

How do bear markets affect the economy?

Bear markets are sometimes precursors to recessions, but not always.

Recessions, defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months,” are much more perilous for the economy. Recessions often lead to job losses as economies contract, such as in the summer of 2020, when unemployment levels rose to their worst levels since the Great Depression.

Where did these names — bulls and bears — originate?

The exact origins of the phrase are unclear. But they came into mainstream vernacular in London in the 18th century. One theory traces “bear” to the proverb “selling the bear skin before you’ve caught the bear,” according to Merriam Webster. The poet Alexander Pope and other writers helped popularize the use of the words bull or bear to describe the stock market when writing about the frenzied rally of the South Sea Company stock and its infamous plummet in a financial scandal referred to as the South Sea bubble.

What will happen next?

Mr. Trump on Monday repeated his calls for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. But the Fed does not seem in a hurry to intervene.

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said on Friday that the central bank needed to assess the economic effects of the tariffs before taking action, and he has warned that cutting rates could fan inflation.

A new wave of Trump tariffs that are set to take effect this week could lead to even more turmoil in the markets. When asked by reporters on Sunday about the market turmoil and fears of a recession, Mr. Trump said that “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

The warning by Mr. Dimon, one of Wall Street’s most influential leaders, echoes the growing anxiety among corporate chiefs about how the tariffs will play out. Even those who had initially professed support for Mr. Trump’s trade plans are becoming increasingly worried about the consequences.

Even before Mr. Trump’s tariff announcement last week, the U.S. economy had been showing signs of strain after years of healthy performance, Mr. Dimon wrote. Inflation was already a worry, he said, pointing to a yawning fiscal deficit and the need for more infrastructure spending. And stock valuations remain well above historical averages, even after the recent market sell-off.

The potential consequences of the trade fight could make things worse, the letter said. Those include other countries’ efforts to fight back — as China has done by imposing 34 percent counterlevies — and a possible erosion of confidence among consumers and investors. Mr. Dimon also warned about the weakening of the American dollar’s role as the global reserve currency.

“If America, for whatever reason, becomes a less attractive investment destination, the U.S. dollar and the economy could suffer if foreigners sold their U.S. assets,” he wrote.

JPMorgan’s own economists have increasingly been saying a recession is more likely this year, though Mr. Dimon did not personally take a position on those odds in his shareholder letter.

While he asserted that JPMorgan itself was strong enough to withstand the shocks that the levies posed — its traders have profited from previous whipsaws in the markets — the global economy may not be so fortunate. “It is not particularly good for the capital markets,” Mr. Dimon wrote of the tariff-linked volatility.

For now, Mr. Dimon wrote, he is hoping for a speedy resolution to the trade battles. “The quicker this issue is resolved, the better, because some of the negative effects increase cumulatively over time and would be hard to reverse,” he wrote.

The longer-term worry, Mr. Dimon said, is that Mr. Trump’s fight could shred decades-old alliances that cemented the United States’ primacy in the global order. The JPMorgan chief wrote that he was worried that America’s trading partners might seek out deals with the likes of China, Iran or Russia in response to the tariffs.

“America First is fine,” Mr. Dimon wrote, referring to Mr. Trump’s description of his policies, “as long as it doesn’t end up being America alone.”

Last month, President Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on imported cars and auto parts, upending the complex supply chains that underpin the global auto industry. The tariffs on cars imported into the United States came into effect last week and a levy on parts is set to begin next month.

“Global trade is being transformed so we must go further and faster in reshaping our economy,” Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, said in a statement.

On Saturday, the British luxury automaker, Jaguar Land Rover, said that it was pausing shipments to the United States this month, as it assessed the altered trading conditions. The United States is the largest single-country export market for British cars, with 6.4 billion pounds’ ($8.3 billion) worth of vehicles shipped there in 2023. That’s about a tenth of Britain’s overall exports in goods to the United States.

Even before the latest tariffs by the Trump administration, Britain’s car industry was struggling. Last year, car production dropped to its lowest level in seven decades.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, an industry group, welcomed the government’s changes to the electric-vehicle mandate but said that more action was probably needed to increase consumer demand for these cars.

“Industry remains committed to decarbonizing road transport,” Mike Hawes, the chief executive of the group, said in a statement. The targets in the electric vehicle mandate “are incredibly challenging, especially with a paucity of consumer demand and geopolitical upheaval,” he added.

The government also exempted small-volume, high-end manufacturers, such as McLaren and Aston Martin, from the rules. And vans with an internal combustion engine will also be allowed to be sold until 2035, alongside hybrid vans.

So far, the British government has resisted hitting back with retaliatory tariffs on goods it imports from the United States. The Trump administration imposed a “base line” 10 percent tariff on goods from Britain, but not additional “reciprocal” levies that apply to many other countries. Mr. Starmer has said that he remained “calm” and was working toward negotiating a trade deal with the United States, focused on technology.

But the government was ready to intervene where needed to “shelter British business from the storm,” the prime minister wrote in The Sunday Telegraph.

In a statement, Central Huijin did not identify the stocks it purchased, other than that they were exchange-traded funds, which are baskets of stocks that track indexes. The company said it would continue to increase its holdings in the future.

Stock benchmarks in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen plunged on Monday, and shares of some of China’s biggest consumer technology and app companies suffered drastic losses.

Xiaomi, a smartphone maker that has branched out into electric vehicles, plummeted over 20 percent.

The e-commerce company Alibaba dropped 18 percent and Tencent, the company behind China’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat, fell 13 percent.

In a note on Monday, analysts at Morgan Stanley forecast that U.S. tariffs could have a “far greater growth drag” on China’s economy than more limited levies did in Trump’s first term. “The deflation loop is still alive,” they wrote.

And fear of what may come next.

In conversations with The New York Times over the weekend, bankers, executives and traders said they felt flashbacks to the 2007-8 global financial crisis, one that took down a number of Wall Street’s giants. Leaving out the brutal, but relatively short-lived market panic that erupted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the velocity of last week’s market decline — stocks fell 10 percent over just two days — was topped only by the waves of selling that came as Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.

Few companies have discussed their outlooks publicly since last week’s tariff announcements, but major banks including JPMorgan and Wells Fargo will begin holding investor calls to address their earnings (and prospects) on Friday.

The uncertainty was neatly exemplified by Daniel S. Loeb, a billionaire hedge fund manager, who on Saturday wrote on X: “Sometimes market bottom when things look most bleak.”

“Not a prediction,” he added, “but keeping an open mind.”

The measures would lead to higher inflation and slower growth than initially expected, Mr. Powell warned during an event in Arlington, Va., on Friday. He showed concern about the souring economic outlook, but his emphasis on the potential inflationary effect of the new tariffs made clear that it was a significant source of angst.

“Our obligation is to keep longer-term inflation expectations well anchored and to make certain that a one-time increase in the price level does not become an ongoing inflation problem,” Mr. Powell said. The Fed’s mandate includes two goals, fostering a healthy labor market and maintaining low, stable inflation.

Before Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, inflation was already proving to be stubbornly sticky, staying well above the Fed’s 2 percent target. Yet the economy had stayed remarkably resilient, leading the central bank to adopt a more gradual approach to interest rate cuts that culminated in its pausing reductions in January. At that policy meeting, Mr. Powell established that the Fed would need to see “real progress on inflation or, alternatively, some weakness in the labor market” to restart cuts.

But with inflation set to soar because of tariffs, it will take tangible evidence that the economy is weakening significantly to get the central bank going again. That could mean that rate cuts are pushed off until much later this year or even delayed until next year if that deterioration takes time to materialize.

“They will not be inclined to be pre-emptive to cut rates to avoid what may be a downturn,” said Richard Clarida, a former vice chair at the Fed who is now a global economic adviser at PIMCO, an investment firm. “They’re actually going to have to see an actual crack in the labor market.”

Mr. Clarida said he would look for a “material” rise in the unemployment rate or a “very sharp slowdown, if not a contraction,” in monthly jobs growth to account for what he expected would be a significant lurch higher in inflation.

The latest jobs report, which was released Friday, showed that on the eve of Mr. Trump’s latest tariff blitz, the labor market was far from cracking. Employers added 228,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2 percent as participation in the labor market rose.

Any enthusiasm about the latest data was quickly overtaken by a torrent of worries about the economic outlook — concerns Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers sought to address on Sunday.

Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, acknowledged that the president’s approach could exacerbate inflation. “There might be some increase in prices,” he said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” But he insisted that Mr. Trump’s plan would ultimately reverse a long-running trend of importing lower-cost products in exchange for job losses.

“We got the cheap goods at the grocery store, but then we had fewer jobs,” Mr. Hassett said.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, also sought to downplay the prospects of a recession, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that there would be an “adjustment process.”

Economists across Wall Street are much more gloomy about the outlook. Many have sharply raised their recession odds alongside their forecasts for inflation. Those economists fear that Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which are a tax on imports, will eventually decimate consumer spending, squeeze businesses’ profit margins and potentially lead to layoffs that push the unemployment rate above 5 percent.

Many in this cohort expect the Fed to lower interest rates swiftly as a result, beginning as early as June. Federal funds futures markets reflect an even more aggressive response, with five quarter-point cuts priced in for this year.

Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan, is calling for a recession in the second half of this year, with growth declining 1 percent in the third quarter and another 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter. Over the course of the year, he expects growth to fall 0.3 percent and the unemployment rate to rise to 5.3 percent. Even as the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — once volatile food and energy prices are stripped out — surges to 4.4 percent, Mr. Feroli forecasts that the Fed will restart cuts in June and then lower borrowing costs at every meeting through January until the policy rate reaches 3 percent.

Jonathan Pingle, chief U.S. economist at UBS, has penciled in a percentage point’s worth of cuts this year even as core inflation reaches 4.6 percent. He expects the unemployment rate to shoot higher this year before peaking at 5.3 percent in 2026. Economists at Goldman Sachs projected that the Fed would deliver three consecutive quarter-point cuts beginning in July.

But there are credible risks to this outlook. The prevailing one is that the inflation shock will be just too enormous for the Fed to look past it by the summer, especially if the economy has not yet deteriorated in a meaningful way.

“The burden of proof now is higher because of the inflation situation that we’re in,” said Seth Carpenter, a former Fed economist who is now at Morgan Stanley. “They have to get enough information that convinces them that the negative effects of slowing — and possibly negative — growth outweighs the cost to them of inflation.”

Mr. Carpenter said he expected no cuts from the Fed this year but multiple next year, bringing interest rates down to between 2.5 percent and 2.75 percent. Economists at LHMeyer, a research firm, have also shelved cuts this year, assuming there is no “full-blown” recession.

Perhaps the most important determinant of when the central bank will restart rate cuts is what happens with inflation expectations. Beyond a year ahead, expectations have stayed somewhat stable, aside from some survey-based measures that are seen as less reliable than others.

If those expectations begin to wobble in a more notable way, the Fed will become even more hesitant to cut and will need to see even more economic weakness than usual, said William English, a Yale professor and a former director of the Fed’s division of monetary affairs.

Eric Winograd, an economist at the investment firm AllianceBernstein, said Mr. Powell’s inflation-focused posture on Friday would help to avoid that outcome. “The name of the game is: You talk tough,” he said. “You keep inflation expectations where they are, and, by doing that, you preserve your ability to ease later if it’s necessary.”

A higher bar for interest rate cuts could put the Fed in a tougher spot with the Trump administration, Mr. English said. Up until last week, the president had been more subdued in his criticism of the central bank than in his first term. He had called for lower interest rates but sought to justify them by pointing to his plans to lower energy prices, among other reasons.

But as the rout in financial markets has intensified, Mr. Trump has turned his ire back toward Mr. Powell and the Fed. On Monday, Mr. Trump said the “slow moving” Fed should cut rates. At one point, the president appeared to suggest that the market rout was part of his strategy. He circulated a video from a user on Mr. Trump’s social media network that suggested the president was “purposely CRASHING” the markets in part to force the Fed to lower interest rates.

Pressed on the matter on Sunday, Mr. Hassett of the National Economic Council responded by saying the Fed was independent, adding: “He’s not trying to tank the market.”

Mr. Trump has already sought to chip away at the central bank’s longstanding independence from the White House by targeting the Fed’s oversight of Wall Street. His decision last month to fire two Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission has also reverberated widely, raising important questions about what kind of authority the president has over independent agencies and the personnel who run them.

At the event on Friday, Mr. Powell said he fully intended to serve out all of his term, which ends in May 2026. He has also previously been explicit that early removal by the president is “not permitted under the law.”

“The risk to the Fed’s independence is bigger now,” Mr. English, the Yale professor, said. “It just puts them right in the firing line.”

China’s investments and advances in manufacturing are producing a wave of exports that threatens to cause factory closings and layoffs not just in the United States but also around the globe.

“The tsunami is coming for everyone,” said Katherine Tai, who was the United States trade representative for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

President Trump’s steep tariffs announced on Wednesday, which have caused stocks in Asia and elsewhere to plunge, were the most drastic response yet to China’s export push. From Brazil and Indonesia to Thailand and the European Union, many countries have already moved more quietly to increase tariffs as well.

Chinese leaders are furious at the recent proliferation of trade barriers, and particularly Mr. Trump’s latest tariffs. They take pride in China’s high savings rate, long work hours and abundance of engineers and software programmers, as well as its legions of electricians, welders, mechanics, construction workers and other skilled tradesmen.

On state television Saturday night, an anchor solemnly read a government statement condemning the United States: “It is using tariffs to subvert the existing international economic and trade order” so as “to serve the hegemonic interests of the United States.”

Five years ago, before a housing bubble burst, cranes putting up apartment towers dotted practically every city in China. Today, many of those cranes are gone and the ones that are left seldom move. At Beijing’s behest, banks have rapidly shifted their lending from real estate to industry.

China is using more factory robots than the rest of the world combined, and most of them are made in China by Chinese companies, although some components are still imported. After several years of rapid growth, overall installations of new factory equipment have already jumped another 18 percent this year.

When Zeekr, a Chinese electric carmaker, opened a factory four years ago in Ningbo, a two-hour drive south of Shanghai, the facility had 500 robots. Now it has 820, and many more are planned.

As new factories come online, China’s exports are rapidly accelerating. They rose 13.3 percent in 2023 and then another 17.3 percent last year.

Lending by state banks is also financing a boom in corporate research and development. Huawei, a conglomerate making items as varied as smartphones and auto parts, has just opened in Shanghai a research center for 35,000 engineers that has 10 times as much space for offices and labs as Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Leaders around the world are struggling to decide whether to raise trade barriers to protect what is left of their countries’ industrial sectors.

China has been rapidly expanding its share of global manufacturing for decades. The growth came mainly at the expense of the United States and other longtime industrial powers, but also of developing countries. China has increased its share to 32 percent and rising, from 6 percent in 2000.

China’s factory output is bigger than the combined manufacturing of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain.

Even before Mr. Trump won a second term, Biden administration officials warned during their final year in office about industrial overcapacity in China. They raised some tariffs, notably on electric cars.

But during their first three years, Biden administration officials mostly focused on tighter export controls for technologies like high-end semiconductors, citing national security concerns. They left in place tariffs of 7.5 percent to 25 percent that Mr. Trump had imposed on half of China’s exports to the United States in his first term.

It remains uncertain how the president’s much tougher approach this time will play out. Tariffs have occasionally slowed China’s growth in exports, but not stopped it. Other nations are on high alert for the possibility that Chinese exports could be diverted elsewhere, threatening the economies of longstanding U.S. allies like the European Union and South Korea.

China’s automakers were preparing a push into the American car market in 2017, when Mr. Trump first took office. GAC Motor in Guangzhou, China, brought dozens of U.S. car dealers to the city’s auto show that November. The company announced plans to sell gasoline-powered sport utility vehicles and minivans in the United States by the end of 2019.

But GAC and other Chinese automakers canceled their plans after Mr. Trump included cars in his initial 25 percent tariffs several months later.

Chinese companies still sell almost no cars in the United States. That is unlikely to change: With Mr. Trump’s latest moves, Chinese carmakers now face U.S. tariffs as high as 181 percent.

Blocked in the United States, Chinese automakers have continued building factories and have pivoted their export campaigns elsewhere. Their sales have soared in Australia and Southeast Asia, taking market share from Japanese and American brands. In Mexico, Chinese carmakers held just 0.3 percent in 2017; by last year, it was over 20 percent.

Rapid sales gains in the European Union, and evidence of Chinese government subsidies, prompted E.U. officials last October to impose tariffs of up to 45 percent on electric cars from China.

China is not just building car factories. It has built more petrochemical refinery capacity in the past five years, for example, than Europe, Japan and South Korea together have created since World War II. And China is on track to build these refineries even faster this year. Petrochemicals are then turned into plastics, polyester, vinyl and tires.

Robert E. Lighthizer, who was the United States trade representative in Mr. Trump’s first term, said that the latest American tariffs “are long overdue medicine — the real root cause is decades of Chinese industrial policy that has created breathtaking overcapacity and global imbalances.”

China is exporting so much partly because its own people are buying so little. A housing market crash since 2021 has wiped out much of the savings of the middle class and ruined many wealthy families.

Tax revenues are falling, but military spending is rising rapidly. That has left the government wary of spending on economic stimulus to help consumers. China has offset its housing debacle instead with its export campaign, creating millions of jobs to build, outfit and operate factories.

Some Chinese economists have recently joined Western economists in suggesting that the country needs to strengthen its meager social safety net. At the start of this year, the minimum government pension for seniors was just $17 a month. That barely buys groceries, even in rural China.

The country’s best-known economist, Professor Li Daokui of Tsinghua University, publicly called in January for raising the minimum monthly pension several fold, to $110. The Chinese government could afford it, he argued, and extra spending by seniors would stimulate the entire economy.

Chinese officials rejected his advice. When the budget came out on March 5, it had an increase in monthly pensions — but it was just $3, bringing them to $20 a month.

The same budget included $100 billion for investments, including ports and other infrastructure that help exporters. And there was a new program to upgrade technology used in manufacturing across 20 Chinese cities.

“It is too soon to say what will be the appropriate path for monetary policy,” he said at a conference in Virginia.

For days, the market momentum has been almost entirely downward, bringing a dubious distinction in sight: a bear market, which is a decline of at least 20 percent from a market top. For the S&P 500, a bear market is already within shouting distance, a scant 2.6 percentage points away.

Investors may need to be very patient, and to hope that changes in tariff policy occur rapidly enough in Washington to turn the markets around and, more important, avert a recession.