The market rollercoaster of the past week – the tariffs, the jeopardy, the brinkmanship – has highlighted the remarkable nature of an interconnected world we take for granted.

There are many frontlines in this global trade war and the port of Duluth-Superior is one. It is a logistical and an engineering wonder.

In the northernmost part of the United States, near the border with Canada, there is no seaport anywhere in the world as far inland as this.

The sea is more than 2,000 miles away, to the east, along the Great Lakes-St Lawrence Seaway System, a binational waterway with a shared border between the US and Canada.

On the portside, vast ocean-going vessels are loaded and unloaded with products which make up the lifeblood of the global economy – iron ore for Canada, cement from Turkey, grain for Algeria and shipping containers packed with “Made in China” products for the American market.

My guide is Jayson Hron from the Duluth Seaway Port Authority.

“A vessel that is sailing through the seaway to Duluth crosses the international boundary nearly 30 times on that journey,” he tells me.

Duluth-Superior generates $1.6bn (£1.2bn) a year, supports more than 7,000 jobs, and these are nervous times.

“It’s certainly a season of more unpredictability than we’ve seen in the last few years. Unpredictability is bad for ports and bad for supply chains,” Mr Hron says.

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Tariffs mean friction and friction is bad for everyone. Approximately 30 million metric tons of waterborne cargo moves through the port each season, placing it among the nation’s top 20 ports in terms of cargo flow.

“Iron ore is the port’s king cargo by tonnage,” Mr Hron says. “It makes up about half of our waterborne tonnage total each year. It is mined 65 miles/104km from the port, on Minnesota’s Iron Range.”

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But not all of the iron ore sails to domestic mills. Almost a third sailed to Canada in 2024, now subject to the trade war levies between the two nations.

“A fifth of our port’s overall waterborne tonnage was Canadian trade in 2024, with the vast majority of it export tonnage from the US to Canada,” Mr Hron says.

Geography combined with American and Canadian engineering over many decades has made this port a logistical wonder. From the high seas, cargo can be imported and exported to and from the heart of the North American continent.

On the dockside, the Federal Yoshino is being prepared for her cargo. She will leave here soon with American grain destined for Algeria.

The port straddles two states. The John A Blatnik interstate bridge links Duluth with Superior and Minnesota with Wisconsin.

A network of roads and rails links the port with the country beyond, and an hour to the southeast are the fields of gold in Wisconsin.

Trump suggests farmers can sell more products at home

Last year, soybeans were the biggest export from the US to China, totalling nearly $12.8bn (£10bn) in trade.

Donald Trump has suggested American farmers can make up the difference by selling more of their products at home.

In March, he posted on social media: “To the Great Farmers of the United States: Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States. Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!”

But there is no solid domestic market for soybeans – America’s second largest crop. Two-fifths of the exports go to China. No other export market comes close – 11% to Mexico and 9% to the EU – also now facing potential tariff barriers too.

‘These fields are rows of gold’

Tanner Johnson is a local farmer and soybean industry representative. He talks regularly to politicians in Washington DC.

“They don’t look like much in your hand. But these fields are rows of gold,” he says.

Farmers across this country voted overwhelmingly for Mr Trump. Is there anxiety? Absolutely.

“I don’t want to put an exact timeline on when doors around here will close. But in the short term I think most farmers can handle it. Long-term – a year, year plus – things are going to look a lot more bleak around here,” Mr Johnson tells me.

Here, they mostly seem to hold on to a trust in Mr Trump. There remains a belief that his wild negotiating with their livelihoods will pay off. But it’s high stakes and with an uncertainty that no one needs.

Chalk this one up to the bond vigilantes.

This is the term used periodically to describe investors who push back against what are perceived to be irresponsible fiscal or monetary policies by selling government bonds, in the process pushing up yields, or implied borrowing costs.

Most of the focus on markets in the wake of Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on the rest of the world has, in the last week, been about the calamitous stock market reaction.

This was previously something that was assumed to have been taken seriously by Mr Trump.

During his first term in the White House, the president took the strength of US equities – in particular the S&P 500 – as being a barometer of the success, or otherwise, of his administration.

He had, over the last week, brushed off the sour equity market reaction to his tariffs as being akin to “medicine” that had to be taken to rectify what he perceived as harmful trade imbalances around the world.

But, as ever, it is the bond markets that have forced Mr Trump to blink – and, make no mistake, blink is what he has done.

To begin with, following the imposition of his tariffs – which were justified by some cockamamie mathematics and a spurious equation complete with Greek characters – bond prices rose as equities sold off.

That was not unusual: big sell-offs in equities, such as those seen in 1987 and in 2008, tend to be accompanied by rallies in bonds.

However, this week has seen something altogether different, with equities continuing to crater and US government bonds following suit.

At the beginning of the week yields on 10-year US Treasury bonds, traditionally seen as the safest of safe haven investments, were at 4.00%.

By early yesterday, they had risen to 4.51%, a huge jump by the standards of most investors. This is important.

The 10-year yield helps determine the interest rate on a whole clutch of financial products important to ordinary Americans, including mortgages, car loans and credit card borrowing.

By pushing up the yield on such a security, the bond investors were doing their stuff. It is not over-egging things to say that this was something akin to what Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng experienced when the latter unveiled his mini-budget in October 2022.

And, as with the aftermath to that event, the violent reaction in bonds was caused by forced selling.

Now part of the selling appears to have been down to investors concluding, probably rightly, that Mr Trump’s tariffs would inject a big dose of inflation into the US economy – and inflation is the enemy of all bond investors.

Part of it appears to be due to the fact the US Treasury had on Tuesday suffered the weakest demand in nearly 18 months for $58bn worth of three-year bonds that it was trying to sell.

But in this particular case, the selling appears to have been primarily due to investors, chiefly hedge funds, unwinding what are known as ‘basis trades’ – in simple terms a strategy used to profit from the difference between a bond priced at, say, $100 and a futures contract for that same bond priced at, say, $105.

In ordinary circumstances, a hedge fund might buy the bond at $100 and sell the futures contract at $105 and make a profit when the two prices converge, in what is normally a relatively risk-free trade.

So risk-free, in fact, that hedge funds will ‘leverage’ – or borrow heavily – themselves to maximise potential returns.

The sudden and violent fall in US Treasuries this week reflected the fact that hedge funds were having to close those trades by selling Treasuries.

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Confronted by a potential hike in borrowing costs for millions of American homeowners, consumers and businesses, the White House has decided to rein back its tariffs, rightly so.

It was immediately rewarded by a spectacular rally in equity markets – the Nasdaq enjoyed its second-best-ever day, and its best since 2001, while the S&P 500 enjoyed its third-best session since World War Two – and by a rally in US Treasuries.

The influential Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs immediately trimmed its forecast of the probability of a US recession this year from 65% to 45%.

Of course, Mr Trump will not admit he has blinked, claiming last night some investors had got “a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid”.

And it is perfectly possible that markets face more volatile days ahead: the spectre of Mr Trump’s tariffs being reinstated 90 days from now still looms and a full-blown trade war between the US and China is now raging.

But Mr Trump has blinked. The bond vigilantes have brought him to heel. This president, who by his aggressive use of emergency executive powers had appeared to be more powerful than any of his predecessors, will never seem quite so powerful again.

A US author – the wife of Weezer bassist Scott Shriner – has been shot and arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.

Jillian Lauren, 51, was left with non-life threatening injuries after the shooting in Eagle Rock, northeast Los Angeles, in California, on Wednesday.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said it had been assisting California Highway Patrol officers in their search for three suspects from a hit-and-run incident.

Lauren was not involved in the hit-and-run but was allegedly holding a handgun while police pursued a suspect through her back garden.

The force said officers ordered her to drop the gun several times, but she refused and pointed it at them.

The LAPD said she was hit by police gunfire and fled into her home, where they took her into custody before taking her to a hospital.

It is unclear if she fired the handgun she was holding.

According to LA County jail records, Lauren is being held on a $1m bail (£777,455).

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She is the author of two bestselling memoirs – 2010’s Some Girls: My Life In A Harem and 2015’s Everything You Ever Wanted.

Lauren and Shriner married in 2005 and have two children.

Weezer, famous for the songs Buddy Holly and Hash Pipe, is set to play at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on Saturday.

There were no immediate responses from representatives for Lauren and Weezer after requests for comment.