WASHINGTON (AP) — Facing a global market meltdown, President Donald Trump on Wednesday abruptly backed down on his tariffs on most nations for 90 days, but raised the tax rate on Chinese imports to 125%.

It was seemingly an attempt to narrow what had been an unprecedented trade war between the U.S. and most of the world to a showdown between the U.S. and China. The S&P 500 stock index jumped more than 7% after the announcement, but the drama over Trump’s tariffs will now be prolonged as the administration engages in negotiations that could cause uncertainties to persist in the world economy.

Trump posted on Truth Social that because “more than 75 Countries” had reached out to the U.S. government for trade talks and have not retaliated in meaningful way “I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.”

Trump later told reporters that he pulled back on many global tariffs — but not on China — because people were “yippy,” and “afraid,” adding that while he expected to reach deals that “nothing’s over yet.”

The president said he had been watching the bond market and that people were “getting a little queasy.” But after his tariff pause, Trump described the bond market as “beautiful.”

It seemed impossible to fully deny the pressure created by volatile financial markets that had been pushing Trump to reconsider his tariffs, even as some administration officials said the reversal had always been the plan. The pause was announced after the global economy appeared to be in open rebellion against Trump’s tariffs as they took effect Wednesday, a signal that the U.S. president was not immune from market pressures.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says President Trump is not doing what his voters want.

The 10% tariff was the baseline rate for most nations that went into effect on Saturday. It’s meaningfully lower than the 20% tariff that Trump had set for goods from the European Union, 24% on imports from Japan and 25% on products from South Korea. Still, 10% would represent an increase in the tariffs previously charged by the U.S. government.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the negotiations with individual countries would be “bespoke,” meaning that the next 90 days would involve talks on a flurry of potential deals. Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, told reporters that the pause was because of other countries seeking talks rather than brutal selloffs in the financial markets.

“The only certainty we can provide is that the U.S. is going to negotiate in good faith, and we assume that our allies will too,” Bessent said.

The treasury secretary said he and Trump “had a long talk on Sunday, and this was his strategy all along” and that the president had “goaded China into a bad position.” Bessent said that Canada and Mexico would now be tariffed at 10%, even though those two countries had been tariffed by as much as 25% by Trump ostensibly to address fentanyl smuggling and illegal immigration.

Prior to the reversal, business executives were warning of a potential recession caused by his policies, some of the top U.S. trading partners are retaliating with their own import taxes and the stock market is quivering after days of decline.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the walk back was part of Trump’s negotiating strategy. Leavitt said that the news media “clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here. You tried to say that the rest of the world would be moved closer to China, when in fact, we’ve seen the opposite effect the entire world is calling the United States of America, not China, because they need our markets.”

But market pressures had been building for weeks ahead of Trump’s move, with the president at times suggesting the import taxes would stay in place while also saying that they could be subject to negotiations.

Particularly worrisome was that U.S. government debt had lost some of its luster with investors, who usually treat Treasury notes as a safe haven when there’s economic turbulence. Government bond prices had been falling, pushing up the interest rate on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note to 4.45%. That rate eased after Trump’s reversal.

Gennadiy Goldberg, head of U.S. rates strategy at TD Securities, said before the announcement that markets wanted to see a truce in the trade disputes.

“Markets more broadly, not just the Treasury market, are looking for signs that a trade de-escalation is coming,” he said. “Absent any de-escalation, it’s going to be difficult for markets to stabilize.”