Automakers around the world were treated to a symphony of engine backfiring on Thursday, the first day of trading since markets digested new 25% US tariffs on imports of cars and parts set to kick in on April 2. Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, Ferrari, Volkswagen, you name it — like the transmission on an old Saab, their shares were all down.

At home in the US, meanwhile, one of Detroit’s Big Three stood out as particularly vulnerable to a potential trade war: General Motors. The carmaker has an exposure problem, and on Thursday it paid a steep price for that.

A Time for Generalization

Ford is the best insulated of the Big Three, with 79% of the cars it sells in the US built on domestic soil. Chrysler-owner Stellantis, meanwhile, imports roughly 40% of the vehicles it sells in America from Mexico and Canada. But GM, which has assembly plants in Mexico, Canada and South Korea, imports 49% of its cars sold in the US, according to Bank of America analysts.

So it’s no surprise that — while Ford shares dropped 3.8% Thursday and Stellantis fell 1.2% — GM shed a dramatic 7.3%. (Stellantis is headquartered in the Netherlands and owns several European brands, meaning its revenue footprint is spread more broadly beyond the US market). GM will continue to face a unique uphill battle:

• The company’s shares are down 11% this year as investors grow concerned that management hadn’t addressed tariffs exposure. In February, CFO Paul Jacobson tried to assuage those concerns by stating GM had a “playbook” to deal with tariffs, which included trimming its foreign inventory by 30% at that point to get vehicles in before tariffs went up.
• But if tariffs stay in place for a long period and more inventory is needed, GM could be looking at a price problem. Goldman Sachs estimated Thursday that the 25% levy could push up the sticker price on imported cars by $5,000 to $15,000, compared with just $3,000 to $8,000 for ones manufactured stateside.

One merciful reprieve for GM: Trump administration officials said there will be a temporary exemption on vehicles and parts subject to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free-trade agreement, meaning the company may have more time to move inventory stateside.

Sticker Shock Therapy: Elon Musk-led Tesla, which makes all the cars it sells in the US at its Texas and California facilities, rose 1.7% on Thursday. The $14.3 billion increase in Tesla’s market cap was more than triple the $4.6 billion combined market value that Ford and GM lost, in a testament to the electric carmaker’s mammoth valuation, even in a down year.

AI cloud company CoreWeave’s IPO ambitions aren’t as sky-high as they once were. The AI darling is going public with a valuation nearly $10 billion less than it initially planned.

CoreWeave, which starts trading on the Nasdaq today, sought a valuation of $23 billion, down from the $32 billion goal it set last week. Semafor first reported the Nvidia-backed cloud company would scale back its IPO to raise only about $1.5 billion. The startup initially aimed to fetch up to $2.7 billion.

Hype climbed for CoreWeave’s IPO after it signed an $11.9 billion deal with OpenAI earlier this month. But skeptics have side-eyed the not-yet-profitable company’s $8 billion debt pile (as of last year) and its dependence on leased data centers.

CoreWeave said it’d use $1 billion raised in its IPO to pay down its debt…but also that it plans to keep borrowing.

Hit the Ground Jogging

CoreWeave’s scale-back signals a slower start for AI-focused IPOs than analysts had hoped. As the first startup primarily focused on AI to debut in the US, CoreWeave was expected to set off a wave of promising public offerings that could boost markets. While the Nasdaq has fallen about 7% this year as tech stocks tanked, Forge Global estimates private AI companies gained 60% in the past six months.

Investors have hoped that CoreWeave might also mark the beginning of a wider thawing of the IPO market, which has been chilly for the past three years after dealmaking nosedived in 2022.

• Buy-now-pay-later lender Klarna and ticket-seller StubHub recently filed to go public.
• Other companies are hesitating: Payments processor Stripe and AI data company Databricks have chosen to stay private, while car-rental startup Turo pulled its listing altogether last month.

Defrost Setting: A lukewarm offering may not be enough to reinvigorate the US IPO market, which has been slowly heating up but is still far behind its pre-pandemic glory days: $30 billion worth of IPO deals went down last year compared with $152 billion in 2021. CoreWeave’s performance on the Nasdaq, however, could influence other startups’ plans to go public and investors’ overall enthusiasm for AI companies.

All hail the Egg King.

On Thursday, Global Eggs — a Luxembourg-based company that operates in Brazil, led by self-annointed “Egg King” Ricardo Faria — announced a $1.1 billion acquisition of Hillandale Farms, one of the largest egg producers in the US. The move comes just as egg prices are starting to come down in the US.

Eggceptional Appetites

It may not be reflected in supermarket prices yet, but eggflation is finally starting to crack. The wholesale cost of a dozen white eggs averaged just $3.27 on March 21, according to the US Department of Agriculture (its next egg report is due later today). That’s down over 20% from the week before, and way down from the $8.16 peak seen at the start of the month.

A big reason for the tumble: Loads and loads of eggs from Brazil. US imports of Brazilian eggs surged 93% in February, according to the Brazilian Animal Protein Association. But Faria told the Financial Times that the Hillandale purchase would’ve happened with or without the avian flu and subsequent Brazilian import boom. Why? Americans love their eggs:

• Egg consumption per capita in the US reached around 274 last year, according to the industry trade group Farm Action. That’s down from a peak of 292 in 2019, pre-eggflation, but up from 259 in 2013.
• “Eggs were once a product for low-income classes. Over the last 15 years, higher-income classes decided to get slimmer, live better and substitute foods like bread and milk for eggs at breakfast,” Faria told the FT, calling eggs “the fastest-growing consumer good” on supermarket shelves.

What the Cluck: With Hillandale — one of the five largest egg producers in the US — in the portfolio, Faria says Global Eggs will essentially double its egg production per year. That may be a bit of a problem. US antitrust enforcers are already looking at whether America’s top egg producers are engaged in illegal price fixing, according to a recent New York Times report, possibly using the avian flu as a pretext to boost profits. While some 15% of the US egg-laying flock has been killed in the past four months, wholesale egg prices have spiked 255%, according to one metric. Meanwhile, top egg producer Cal-Maine, the only publicly traded company of the group, has reported profits of $219 million in its most recent quarterly report, up an astounding 1,189% year-over-year. We’re guessing Hillandale and Global Eggs’ legal teams feel like they’re walking on regulatory eggshells.