Donald Trump has revealed a fresh round of trade tariffs on several key sectors, with the most punitive rate likely to affect UK businesses.

The US president used his Truth Social account last night to confirm that a new 100% tariff would apply to any branded or patented pharmaceutical product from 1 October.

He said that to escape the clutches of that duty, a company must have already broken ground on a new US factory.

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From the same date, a 50% tariff would be applied to all imported kitchen and bathroom cabinets while upholstered furniture faced a 30% rate.

A 25% tariff faced shipments of heavy trucks.

The president did not confirm whether the duties would be lower for nations to have agreed trade deals with his administration, including the UK and European Union.

Each faces a blanket 10% and 15% rate on their exports respectively at the moment.

It is likely, however, that the new duties will be applied in line with other, higher, sectoral tariffs that are currently in place above those agreed rates.

“The reason for this is the large scale “FLOODING” of these products into the United States by other outside Countries,” Trump said in his post.

The lack of detail around the application of the planned new tariff rules means further uncertainty for companies potentially affected.

Shares in pharmaceutical firms listed in Asia fell sharply overnight as industry bodies rushed to seek clarification on the new rules.

AstraZeneca – the UK’s most valuable listed company – already has vast US manufacturing and research operations.

In July, as the threat of tariffs loomed large, it revealed plans for a further $50bn investment by 2030.

US figures show the country imported $233bn of drugs and medicines from abroad last year.

A 100% tariff rate, even on some of those shipments, risk ramping up the cost of US healthcare.

By imposing the 100% tariff rate, Mr Trump wants to bring prices down through encouraging domestic production.

US industry groups lined up to oppose the planned measures.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said non-US companies were continuing to announce hundreds of billions of dollars in new US. investments. “Tariffs risk those plans,” it said.

The US Chamber of Commerce urged a U-turn on any truck tariffs.

It said the five nations to be worst affected – Mexico, Canada, Japan, Germany, and Finland – were “allies or close partners of the United States posing no threat to US national security.”.

Small firms reliant on the production-halted British car maker Jaguar Land Rover, “may have at best a week of cashflow left to support themselves” with “urgent” action needed to support businesses.

Liam Byrne, the head of the influential Business and Trade Committee of MPs, wrote to Chancellor Rachel Reeves with the warning after meeting with the car maker’s suppliers.

“Larger firms, we heard, may begin to seriously struggle within a fortnight – and many are simply unclear how they will pay payroll costs at the end of October,” he said

“In short, many firms have merely “weeks left” before the financial impact on them becomes untenable and causes critical damage to key elements of the automotive supply chain.”

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Since 31 August, production has been halted across the car-making supply chain, with staff off work as a result of the attack.

More than 33,000 people work directly for JLR in the UK, many of them on assembly lines in the West Midlands, the largest of which is in Solihull, and a plant at Halewood on Merseyside.

An estimated 200,000 more are employed by several hundred companies in the supply chain, who have faced business interruption with their largest client out of action.

Calls for government financial support had been growing, but Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday afternoon said, “I haven’t got an outcome here to give to you today”.

A partial restart

It comes as JLR announced some of its IT systems are back online after being hit by a cyber attack late last month though production is still not expected to start again until 1 October at the earliest.

“The foundational work of our recovery programme is firmly underway,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

As part of the partial restart, supplier payments can begin again.

“We have significantly increased IT processing capacity for invoicing,” the statement said. “We are now working to clear the backlog of payments to our suppliers as quickly as we can.”

The supply of parts to customers across the world can also now recommence.

After a workaround was reached on Tuesday to allow cars to move to buyers without the usual online registration, the financial system to process wholesale vehicles is back online.

“We are able to sell and register vehicles for our clients faster, delivering important cash flow”, the company said.

“Our focus remains on supporting our customers, suppliers, colleagues and our retailers. We fully recognise this is a difficult time for all connected with JLR and we thank everyone for their continued support and patience.”

There was some speculation, when it emerged that Nigel Farage was heading to Threadneedle Street to see the Bank of England governor, that he was about to “do a Trump”.

You might recall, if you follow American politics, how the US president has been, for want of a better word, trolling the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, threatening to fire him if he didn’t cut interest rates. Might Mr Farage and Reform be about to do the same thing in the UK, raising deep (and, for economists, scary) questions about the independence of the central bank?

The short answer, as far as anyone can tell following today’s meeting, is: no. Instead, Mr Farage and his fellow Reform MP Richard Tice enjoyed a relatively cordial meeting with the governor, where they discussed the intricacies of quantitative easing, the Bank’s reserves policies and even cryptocurrency – a slightly unexpected addition to the agenda which might reflect the fact that Reform is hoping to raise lots of campaign funds from crypto dudes.

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The main Bank-related issue Reform has been campaigning on – Mr Tice in particular – comes back to something seemingly arcane but certainly important. As you may be aware, in recent years, the Bank of England has, alongside its interest rate policy, been engaged in something called quantitative easing (QE). QE is complex, but it boils down to this: in an effort to boost the economy, the Bank bought up a lot of government bonds and they now sit awkwardly in its balance sheet. In recent months, the Bank has begun to reverse QE (quantitative tightening) – selling off billions of pounds of bonds.

Anyway, reach deeper into the arcane mechanism of how QE works and something interesting leaps out. Two things, actually. First, as part of QE, in order to get hold of those government bonds, the Bank created “reserves” – sort of bank-account-at-the-Bank-of-England – for the high street banks from whom it bought them.

Tens of billions to high street banks

Those reserves earn interest at the Bank’s official interest rate. At the time of QE, the rate was near zero, so no one spent much time thinking about reserves. But since then, rates went up to 5.25%, and are now at 4%, and hence the Bank has recently been paying out a hefty amount – tens of billions of pounds – in interest to high street banks.

This, says Richard Tice, is an abomination. In the last Reform manifesto, he said the Bank should stop paying out those reserves. Which, on the face of it, sounds perfectly sensible. However, there are a few catches.

A big bank tax

The first is that while in theory it might help recoup billions of pounds of public money, that money has to come from somewhere, and in this case, it would come from high street banks. In other words, this is, in all but name, a very big bank tax. The Bank of England’s point, when asked about all this, is that if anyone is going to do something like that, it should really be the government, since it’s rightly in charge of taxing and spending.

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The other catch is that Bank of England reserves systems are desperately complex. Changing the way they’re structured is a delicate operation. Running a coach and horses through it, as Mr Tice is suggesting, could have all sorts of unintended consequences, including undermining confidence in UK economic policy.

This, by the way, is not the only thing Reform is unhappy about: they also think the Bank should slow down its quantitative tightening programme.

But the point of all the above is that while there are some big question marks about the particular idea Reform is proposing, the worst thing of all would be not to discuss this as publicly as possible.

The worst outcome of all would be for the government and Bank to take certain decisions which affect billions of pounds of public money with only the merest of scrutiny, save at the Treasury Select Committee, whose sessions rarely get much attention beyond the financial pages. And that is more or less the situation we’ve had for the past decade and a half.

The Bank of England has introduced one of the most radical monetary experiments in history, which may or may not have been a success or a failure, but few outside of the City are even aware of it. Mr Tice’s policy platform may be flawed, but his overarching point – that this stuff desperately needs more scrutiny – is quite right.