Chinese government data released on Friday offered a peek into how the trade war is already reordering the flow of goods around the world.

Exports from China jumped last month, driven by trade to other countries in Southeast Asia, even as President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods forced a sharp slowdown in shipments to the United States.

Inside China, imports fell as demand continued to weaken.

The trade numbers released on Friday capture activity in April, when tensions between the United States and China escalated more rapidly than expected. In a series of measures, President Trump raised tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent, and China responded with 125 percent levies on American goods.

As a result, Chinese shipments to the United States plunged by 21 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. But Chinese exports to Southeast Asian countries surged by 21 percent.

“This is an early signal that something is going on in terms of a front-loading of the supply chain,” said Raymond Yeung, the chief economist for greater China for ANZ, a New Zealand bank. “It’s a redirection of trade that is already well documented,” he said.

Chinese exports to countries like Vietnam and Thailand have soared, Mr. Yeung said, while data on imports from Taiwan and South Korea suggested that Chinese factories are taking advantage of a 90-day pause in tariffs on countries across the region to complete orders destined for the United States.

Overall shipments of goods from China jumped by 8.1 percent in April compared with a year earlier. The data showed a continuation of a trend in the past few months of Chinese factories rushing to get goods shipped as the trade war worsened. Many of those goods ended up in some of the export-oriented countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN.

“Domestic producers have halted most of their production targeting the U.S. market, but they are gearing up product for ASEAN countries because that is where they have set up their factories in preparation for this situation,” said Dan Wang, a director on Eurasia Group’s China team, referring to the 10 countries that are part of the Southeast Asian Nations.

In recent years, as China’s domestic economy has been hobbled by a housing market crash, the government has leaned more heavily on the shipment of its goods overseas. The property crisis has spread through the rest of the economy and left banks and local governments stuck with piles of debt, and young people have struggled with fewer choices for jobs.

The April data is likely to give policymakers in Beijing a breather amid broader worries about the trade war’s impact on China’s economic outlook. But economists warn that unemployment could spike if declining factory orders force companies to fire workers. Chinese factories experienced their steepest monthly slowdown in more than a year in April.

Chinese financial regulators signaled this week that they are ready to step in to boost domestic demand to weather the impact of the trade war. The central bank cut interest rates and loosened the money taps to direct more money into the economy to encourage businesses and people to spend.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, will meet with China’s vice premier, He Lifeng, in Geneva this weekend, the first formal meeting on trade since Mr. Trump raised tariffs into the triple digits in April.

Zixu Wang contributed to reporting from Hong Kong.

In the sprawling flatlands of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula, near the small town of Give, a family-owned company called Welcon has been gearing up to build giant, cylindrical wind turbine towers for a multibillion-dollar project.

The project, a wind farm called Empire Wind, is being built by the Norwegian energy giant Equinor in the waters off Long Island, N.Y. But those plans were thrown into disarray last month when the Trump administration, which is skeptical about offshore wind power, ordered an indefinite halt to construction.

The pause shocked Carsten Pedersen, who owns Welcon with his brother Jens, and the wind industry.

“It’s, in my opinion, a banana republic over there,” Mr. Pedersen said, referring to the chaotic blitz of policy changes coming from Washington. “You cannot just stop projects” whose developers have already put in years of work.

Welcon was tapped as a subcontractor to supply the towers for the project by Vestas Wind Systems, a leading wind turbine maker, which has its headquarters in Aarhus in Jutland.

If Empire Wind is permanently shut down, Vestas will lose a manufacturing order likely worth around $1 billion for 54 of its latest turbines, which have blades nearly 380 feet long. The contractors would probably receive some compensation from Equinor.

The wind industry is crucial to Europe’s ambitions to tackle climate change and enhance energy security, but three months into President Trump’s second term in office, industry executives are reassessing their approach to renewable energy.

An important question is whether the president’s initial flurry of actions, as well as worries about what may come, will derail what looked like the beginning of an industry recovery.

The wind business took a pounding after the pandemic, when higher interest rates and inflation turned contracts and projects into loss makers. Industry executives are counting on Europe to make up for a pullback in the United States.

“We don’t see anything happening in the U.S. jeopardizing the perspective for offshore wind in Europe,” said Rasmus Errboe, chief executive of Orsted, a Denmark-based global wind developer. He added that he expected offshore wind to make up 20 percent to 25 percent of Europe’s electric power generation by 2050 compared with roughly 4 percent in 2024, implying that hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent on new facilities.

Overall, wind provided about 20 percent of Europe’s electricity in 2024, according to WindEurope, an industry group.

Vestas and Orsted both reported positive first-quarter financial results this week. Vestas said it had earned a small profit of 5 million euros in the quarter, compared with a loss a year earlier, while Orsted, which had earlier taken large write-offs on some planned projects in the United States, said profit was up 87 percent, to 4.9 billion danish krone, or about $744 million.

The share price of Vestas is down about 50 percent from a year ago, and Orsted’s has fallen about 40 percent in that same time.

In a sign that the economic and regulatory environment remains difficult, even in Europe, Orsted said Wednesday that it would not proceed with a large planned wind facility called Hornsea 4 in Britain’s North Sea.

Mr. Errboe blamed rising prices from suppliers and uncertainty for the decision, which still will cost the company as much as 4.5 billion krone or about $680 million to compensate contractors and other expenses. “We have simply seen that prices have gone up and also the risk on the project has gone up,” he said.

Despite the risks, offshore wind has been a major success in Northern Europe. Orsted estimates that the cost of electricity from these installations fell 70 percent from 2015 to 2020, thanks to ever-larger turbines and other innovations. Since then, though, the cost of wind generation has risen 50 percent.

A few years ago, the United States looked like a promising market for offshore wind. Now industry executives assume no new offshore projects will start up under the Trump administration.

There are questions over whether the handful of giant projects now underway, which include two by Orsted, called Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Sunrise Wind off Montauk, N.Y., will be completed.

Mr. Errboe said that these projects were already well underway. Orsted took $180 million in write-offs on the value of these wind farms because of the impact of the 25 percent tariff imposed on imported steel and aluminum by the Trump administration.

Because it is mainly a land-based-turbine builder, Vestas, which has 30 percent of the world market outside China, is somewhat insulated from the travails of offshore wind, a newer, riskier industry.

Henrik Andersen, the company’s president and chief executive, said in an interview that through the pandemic and earlier periods of international concern about China, Vestas had learned to geographically arrange its turbine manufacturing to reduce damage from tariffs and other measures. “We generally tend to shuffle things around,” he said.

Vestas has factories in Colorado, where it has been producing land-based turbines that it sells in the United States, one of its largest markets.

Mr. Andersen said these facilities had been running “seven days a week” to produce turbines ordered under the favorable conditions that prevailed during the Biden administration.

Having U.S. factories, he said, reduced the affect of tariffs, although some components like generators are still likely to be imported.

Whether factories will continue to operate at full tilt depends on whether confidence returns. Orders for onshore turbines in the United States have dried up, at least temporarily, as developers wait for the White House to clarify policies.

Endri Lico, a principal analyst at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, estimates that turbine orders in the United States have fallen to their lowest level since the first quarter of 2020. “Uncertainty dominates,” he said.

Dealing with changes and unknowns has become a wind executive’s role. “Of course, I don’t know what will be announced in five or six days from now,” Mr. Andersen said.

What is certain, though, he said, is costs will be passed on to customers and “tariffs will mean higher electricity prices in the U.S.”

Men dominate the top of the podcasting charts. As listeners, they slightly outnumber women, too. “Brocasters” and the “manosphere” have even become a media obsession, and for good reason. During the election, conservatives successfully tapped into a world of dude-driven content to reach disengaged voters.

But there has been a surge of podcasts made by women, for women, too. And a company called Dear Media is at the center of much of it.

Based in Austin, Texas, Dear Media operates the largest network of podcasts for women. Its nearly 100 shows are as freewheeling and chummy as those in the “manosphere,” similarly hosted by comedians and content creators. Except here, Joe Rogan’s alpha masculinity and Logan Paul’s unabashed idiocy are swapped for girlboss confidence and therapy speak.

Gone, too, is the overt conservatism that now blankets the manosphere — but not all of its ideas. Dear Media emphasizes health and wellness in its programming, at times dipping into the same kind of contrarian thinking that powers Make America Healthy Again, the agenda of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Some of its shows are hosted by medical doctors. Others promote raw milk, parasite cleanses and communicating with angels. There is a do-your-own-research ethos, already familiar to those who follow “MAHA” or even Goop. But here, it is slid between dating diaries and reality-television recaps.

This range is working. In 2024, Dear Media reached No. 7 on Apple Podcasts’ list of top channels, alongside media juggernauts like iHeart, SiriusXM and The New York Times. This year, it debuted a Khloe Kardashian show on X and acquired “The World’s First Podcast,” which inspired a hit Netflix romantic comedy. And its success could open the door for more networks to embrace women’s interest in alternative health.

“These conversations are not new to me or to us, and it’s exciting to see the pickup and the traction,” said Paige Port, the president of the company.

Whether labeled fringe, woo-woo or crunchy, alternative health has long drawn both devotion and debunking. But since the ascent of Mr. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic who believes autism is preventable and seed oil is poisonous, it has never been more mainstream.

If feminist news was the nucleus of “lady blogs” a decade ago, wellness takes its place today. Edison Research recently identified the two topics most interesting to female podcast listeners: self-care and mental health.

In an interview, Michael Bosstick, the chief executive of Dear Media, described his editorial sensibility as “nonjudgmental” and oriented around free speech. He has described himself as a political independent, with a “Don’t Tread on Me” tattoo, and publicly supports Mr. Kennedy, once writing on X that Covid-19 vaccines were “experimental shots that caused many harm.”

Mr. Bosstick, 38, co-founded Dear Media in 2018. Formerly, he was the chief executive of JetBed, a company founded by his father that manufactures beds for private planes. His wife is Lauryn Bosstick of The Skinny Confidential, a self-care product brand operating within Dear Media that began as a blog in 2011.

Together they host one of Dear Media’s most popular shows, “The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast.” Their interviews often complement products in Ms. Bosstick’s line. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and wildly popular podcaster, helped inspire her bubble-gum-pink mouth tape. In April, a guest claimed falsely that tap water contains birth control and that toilet paper is toxic. Ms. Bosstick sells bamboo toilet paper rolls, $33 for a dozen.

“Not everyone likes me,” said Ms. Bosstick, 38, who has been skewered online for years. “I sort of just lean into it.”

The company pays little mind to social media backlash. Claudia and Jackie Oshry, sisters who host the daily pop culture show “The Toast” — one of the network’s most popular podcasts — have also faced criticism, particularly around their mother’s being a prominent anti-Islam activist.

Mr. Bosstick is firm that he has no interest in policing or censoring his hosts. On his own show, he said, whether he agrees or disagrees with a guest, “I want to listen openly, and I try to kind of culturally push that to the rest of the company.”

His thinking aligns with that of the manosphere: Cancel culture is bad, unchecked conversation is good. People are too “hypersensitive,” Mr. Bosstick said.

During the election, that attitude attracted President Trump’s campaign to new media, as he racked up appearances with podcasters including Theo Von, Lex Fridman and Andrew Schulz. In January, two prominent Trumpworld women were similarly drawn to Dear Media.

A week before the inauguration, the Bossticks released a rare interview with the first daughter Ivanka Trump, followed by one with Cheryl Hines, the actress and wife of Mr. Kennedy, three days later. (Last summer, the couple also interviewed Calley Means, a top adviser to Mr. Kennedy.)

Ms. Trump hardly talked politics, which she called a “very dark, negative business.” Over nearly two hours, she talked more about her life, burning French toast and practicing jujitsu.

Some hosts have joked that their progressive politics were out of step with the beliefs of the Bossticks and their guests: “Unfortunately they have ended D.E.I. at Dear Media,” the comedian Mary Beth Barone quipped on her podcast, “Ride,” in February. “Unfortunately Ivanka will be taking the reins.”

But Dear Media’s recruitment has not been hindered. On May 20, Savannah James, wife of LeBron James, will bring “Everybody’s Crazy,” the podcast she co-hosts with entrepreneur April McDaniel, to Dear Media. The company is also introducing shows from Cory Corrine, the former chief executive of Refinery29; Togethxr, a women’s sports brand; Jordin Sparks, the “American Idol” winner; and Anastasia Karanikolaou, an influencer with 10.3 million Instagram followers.

Aurora James, a fashion designer and activist who once dressed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a gown reading “Tax the Rich” for the Met Gala, said she chose to work with Dear Media precisely to reach audiences outside her bubble, such as white women who voted for Mr. Trump.

“I could go to Crooked Media” — a left-leaning podcast network — “but I’m still going to be talking to the same people,” Ms. James said. “If you can’t talk to someone with a different opinion than you, then you also can’t defend your position.” Her show, “Curious,” will begin in June with a conversation on “partnering and polyamory” with Diane von Furstenberg, the fashion designer and wife of the media mogul Barry Diller.

While declining to provide specific figures, Mr. Bosstick said Dear Media’s revenue fell between $51 million and $100 million, largely through advertising. But he does not see podcasts as the primary business. The goal is to “help creators monetize” through various channels: events, merchandise, television, publishing. Video podcasts may be booming, but they are just “one sliver of media,” Mr. Bosstick said.

The company, which has raised about $12 million in investments, has in turn invested in about 10 consumer brands attached to its talent roster, such as Spritz Society canned cocktails and Arrae supplements.

Amanda Hirsch, host of the celebrity interview show “Not Skinny but Not Fat,” approached Dear Media in 2020 using the company’s public website form, she said, circumventing the traditional agent or manager negotiations.

“I just wanted to be one of them,” she said. “You could just tell that it was a supportive environment where you could say whatever you want.”

Dear Media hosts have described their audiences as open-minded, even suggestible. Gabby Bernstein, a motivational speaker and medium, said her “Dear Gabby” listeners were “spiritually inclined” and “looking for answers.”

“They’re coachable,” she said. “I do not experience naysayers.”

In March, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, some of these listeners attended a Dear Media panel. While the subject was the future of women’s media, personal health became the focus.

“When we think something’s wrong, almost always something is wrong,” Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi, a well-known Hollywood gynecologist and co-host of “She MD,” told the crowd.

Audience members lined up afterward, asking questions that revealed their own struggles: a woman who watched her mother suffer from an autoimmune disease; another with postpartum depression; one woman who felt “like a crazy person” after looking to multiple doctors for answers.

This is the nontraditional media approach to health: direct, “raw” and “vulnerable,” as Sami Bernstein Spalter, a fitness entrepreneur and co-host of the “Transform” podcast, described it on the panel. “It allows for that real, intimate connection that we’re all craving,” she said.

Traditional media is comparatively less raw — more edited, more polished, more fact-checked.

“Almost all of these podcasts right now are trying to make this world a better place,” Dr. Aliabadi said. “Reading a magazine doesn’t make this world a better place.”

Beneath the grand chandeliers of the International Ballroom at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, at rooftop bars and at private parties at billionaires’ mansions, there was a mix of emotions among the financial titans gathered in Los Angeles this week.

Many of the thousands of attendees at the Milken Institute Global Conference — a who’s who of finance and corporate America — remained anxious amid volatile markets, continuing trade tensions and deep cuts to the federal government.

“I’m a C.E.O., I talk to a lot of C.E.O.s, and there is nervousness there,” Kamal Bhatia, president and chief executive of Principal Asset Management, said while he sat on the same stage that hosts the Golden Globes.

But there was also a palpable sense of growing optimism after a rocky three-month start to President Trump’s second term: “I’m optimistic about technology, I’m optimistic about the direction of the economy, I’m optimistic about cutting costs,” said Tony Minella, co-founder and president of Eldridge Industries, an asset management firm. “I think there is a lot of excitement in the world right now, and it’s a fantastic time to live.”

The mood at the annual West Coast confab echoed the mood in financial markets.

After Mr. Trump’s unexpectedly high tariffs sent stocks tumbling, there has been some relief from the initial panic as the administration has offered concessions and promoted deal talks that it says will lower tariffs.

The S&P 500 dropped almost 20 percent below its peak in February, but it has since rebounded, recovering roughly two-thirds of its losses.

But despite the recovery, uncertainty remains. Skeptics on the sidelines of the conference suggested that some fund managers were simply painting a rosier outlook to avoid spooking the investors in their funds. Others described it as more hope than conviction.

“Nobody, myself included, can say how this is going to end,” said Ron O’Hanley, chairman and chief executive of State Street. “There may be wishful thinking in all that.”

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, set the tone on Monday morning, as he tried to soothe the financiers’ concerns. He had started his mission the night before, hosting a private dinner for a handful of investors, according to some of the attendees.

Many in the audience on Monday were left hopeful that tariffs would ease as trade deals were made, buffeted by more pro-growth, pro-business policies like tax cuts and deregulation to come later in the year. But there was also an awareness that the reality may still look very different. Business is on hold, corporate deal making is dormant, and the longer that continues, the worse the consequences could be.

With that doubt, many speakers at the conference noted that they were looking more closely at investing in Europe and other parts of the world, diversifying away from the United States’ uncertain future.

Pension funds, university endowments and insurance companies, which have been heavily invested in the United States in recent years, are beginning the slow process of reassessing where they put their money going forward.

Kim Lew, president of the Columbia Investment Management Company, the endowment for Columbia University, noted that while there was good reason so many fund managers became heavily exposed to the U.S. economy, “I think we all wish we had invested in the world more globally.”

Investors souring on U.S. markets fed into another widely discussed concern: the role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and its importance in supporting the government’s $36 trillion of debt.

The corollary of trade deficits is when international investors hold more dollars that have been reinvested in U.S. assets like the government’s debt. If investors begin to back away, either because of tariffs or geopolitics or declining confidence in the stability of the dollar, then the government’s ability to continue financing its debt could be called into question.

“I believe the underlying foundation of the dollar and the Treasury market has been eroding over the last number of years, and we better pay attention to it soon,” said Alan Schwartz, executive chairman of Guggenheim Partners.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, Michael Milken took the stage for a rare keynote speech. Since the conference began in 1998, he has given just two speeches — in 2000 and 2017.

Mr. Milken is widely credited as the father of the high-yield bond market, having devised a way in the 1980s to lend to risky companies that banks and other financial institutions had typically shunned.

In 1990, he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy. He served just under two years of a 10-year prison sentence and was barred from the securities industry for life. He was pardoned by Mr. Trump in 2020.

In his keynote speech, Mr. Milken made a case for the American dream and the importance of economic freedom, equality of opportunity, public health and broad access to education.

“One of the things that has differentiated America from almost every other country in the world is that you have a chance to try, and if you fail, you have a chance to try again,” he said. He added that “quite often, people in our own country have forgotten how lives are changed by freedom.”

Immigration — nor the aggressive detention and deportations that are upending immigrant communities in cities like Los Angeles — was not a big focus of the official discussions at the Milken Institute gathering.

But Mr. Milken chose to conclude his own remarks by celebrating immigrants and referring to the words in President Ronald Reagan’s final speech from the White House in 1989.

“When people think about this speech, they often think about it as an ode to our immigrants in this country and how they have come to this country for the hope of a better life, and they renew each of our focus on the importance of freedom,” Mr. Milken said. “And they make significant contributions to us.”

The United States and Britain announced on Thursday that they had reached a deal that would reduce tariffs on some imports, such as steel, cars and ethanol, and deepen the economic relationship between the two countries.

There was plenty of mutual congratulating between President Trump in the Oval Office and Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, who dialed in on a speakerphone. “This is a really fantastic, historic day,” Mr. Starmer said.

As the dust settled, though, it became clearer that this was just a framework for a deal and there could be weeks, if not more, of additional negotiations before it became final. Here’s what we know.

It’s the first trade deal since Trump ramped up tariffs.

Mr. Trump’s rewriting of the global trade playbook shocked financial markets, and his administration has been under pressure to reach deals to reduce uncertainty. Mr. Trump said that this deal would be the first of many.

The Trump administration said it would open up export opportunities worth $5 billion for American businesses, while also bringing in $6 billion in tariff revenue.

But Mr. Trump said the final details were still being written up, and British officials said negotiators would continue to try to reduce tariffs not included in this deal.

It’s a narrowly focused deal.

The agreement will come as a huge relief for Britain’s auto industry, which will now face 10 percent tariffs on the first 100,000 cars exported annually to the United States. Britain sent 92,000 vehicles to the United States in 2024, according to data from Oxford Economics.

British officials warned that the higher tariffs, which were about 25 percent, had endangered jobs in the country’s car industry, which sent more than a quarter of its auto exports to the United States.

Britain will also be excluded from tariffs on steel and aluminum. In exchange, it increased the quota on beef imports from the United States and said it would remove a tariff on ethanol, which is used in manufacturing.

Britain said that it would receive “preferential treatment” if any further sectoral tariffs were introduced, such as on pharmaceuticals.

The two countries also have a “high-level” agreement on economic security and would work on building a deeper partnership on technology that would cover life sciences, quantum computing, biotech and other sectors.

There are still open questions.

This deal is not final, and neither side said when it could take effect. The British government said it was still negotiating to bring down the 10 percent tariff on most other goods.

Jonathan Reynolds, Britain’s business and trade secretary, said it was a “landmark breakthrough” but that it only reached the “general terms” that will set out the process for more tariff negotiations.

The British government can declare a victory.

The deal could be derailed before it takes effect. For now, however, it puts Britain in a better position than it was in a few weeks ago. The country’s auto and steel industries were already struggling, so any efforts to shore up their ability to export to the United States, an important market, are welcome.

Also, the agreement so far has not caused Britain to cross its red lines about lowering its auto or food safety standards, which would have impeded a deal with the European Union. Britain did not reduce its own tariffs on cars, as some reports had suggested. Nor did it make any changes to its digital services tax, which the Trump administration had said unfairly harmed American tech giants. That tax was introduced in 2020 as a 2 percent duty on revenues of search engines, social media services and online marketplaces, and most of the revenue has come from big American firms like Amazon and Google.

The Trump administration also scored a win, earning praise from American ranchers to increase exports of beef, though they would still have to be free of hormones. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association called it a “tremendous win.”

But it’s not an economic game changer.

Despite the agreement, British goods exports in general still face higher tariffs then they did two months ago, with the base line 10 percent tariff still in place.

And Britain’s trading relationship with the United States is heavily skewed toward services, which are not affected by tariffs. Many economists have cautioned that even with a deal, Britain’s economy is vulnerable to global economic uncertainty.

Reducing that uncertainty would require the Trump administration to secure more deals with other countries and make trade policy more predictable.

Ana Swanson contributed reporting from Washington.