Financial markets soared on Wednesday after President Trump issued a 90-day pause in almost all the tariffs that had roiled the global economy during the past week.

The key exception was China, which had notably declined to back down from Trump’s threats and had issued its own retaliatory tariffs in response. The president announced a further elevation of the tariff rate on China, to a massive 125 percent.

Here are the big takeaways so far.

Trump blinked

The bottom line here is that Trump has backed down.

His capitulation is not total, as the elevated tariffs on China show. But the central point is that the economic and political pain being inflicted as markets melted down over the past week clearly became too much to bear.

Speaking from the White House on Wednesday afternoon, Trump acknowledged that people had been getting spooked — “a little bit yippy,” as he put it — by the turmoil in the markets.

That left Trump with two suboptimal choices: Try to weather the storm or make a U-turn and then put the best possible spin on it.

In the end, he chose the second option. His social media post announcing the change led with the China news, but the announcement of........

© The Hill