Boeing could hand over some of its aircraft that were destined for Chinese airlines to other carriers after China stopped taking deliveries of its planes amid a trade war with the United States.

“They have in fact stopped taking delivery of aircraft due to the tariff environment,” Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday.

Ortberg said that a few 737 Max planes that were in China set to be delivered to carriers there have been flown back to the U.S.

He said some jets that were intended for Chinese customers, as well as aircraft the company was planning to build for China later this year, could go to other customers.

“There’s plenty of customers out there looking for the Max aircraft,” Ortberg said. “We’re not going to wait too long. I’m not going to let this derail the recovery of our company.”

The CEO’s comments came after Boeing reported a narrower-than-expected loss for the first quarter and cash burn that came in better than analysts feared as airplane deliveries surged in the three months ended March 31.

President Donald Trump earlier this month issued sweeping tariffs on imports to the U.S. While he paused some of the highest rates, the trade war with China has only ramped up.

Trump said Tuesday that he’s open to taking a less confrontational approach to trade talks with China, calling the current 145% tariff on Chinese imports “very high.”

“It won’t be that high. … No, it won’t be anywhere near that high. It’ll come down substantially. But it won’t be zero,” Trump said.

Five years removed from the onset of the Covid pandemic, Google is demanding that some remote employees return to the office if they want to keep their jobs and avoid being part of broader cost cuts at the company.

Several units within Google have told remote staffers that their roles may be at risk if they don’t start showing up at the closest office for a hybrid work schedule, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC. Some of those employees were previously approved for remote work.

As the pandemic slips further into the rearview mirror, more companies are tightening their restrictions on remote work, forcing some staffers who moved to distant locations to reconsider their priorities if they want to maintain their employment. The change in tone is particularly acute in the tech industry, which jumped so aggressively into flexible work arrangements in 2020 that San Francisco’s commercial real estate market is still struggling to recover.

Google began offering some U.S. full-time employees voluntary buyouts at the beginning of 2025, and some remote staffers were told that would be their only option if they didn’t return to the nearest office at least three days a week.

The latest threats land at a time when Google and many of its tech peers are looking to slash costs while simultaneously pouring money into artificial intelligence, which requires hefty expenditures on infrastructure and technical talent. Since conducting widespread layoffs in early 2023, Google has undertaken targeted cuts across various teams, emphasizing the importance of increased AI investments.

As of the end of last year, Google had about 183,000 employees, down from roughly 190,000 two years earlier.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin told AI workers in February that they should be in the office every weekday, with 60 hours a week being “the sweet spot of productivity,” according to a memo viewed by CNBC. Brin said the company has to “turbocharge” efforts to keep up with AI competition, which “has accelerated immensely.”

Courtenay Mencini, a Google spokesperson, said the decisions around remote worker return demands are based on individual teams and not a companywide policy.

“As we’ve said before, in-person collaboration is an important part of how we innovate and solve complex problems,” Mencini said in a statement to CNBC. “To support this, some teams have asked remote employees that live near an office to return to in-person work three days a week.”

According to one recent notice, employees in Google Technical Services were told that they’re required to switch to a hybrid office schedule or take a voluntary exit package. Remote employees in the unit are being offered a one-time paid relocation expense to move within 50 miles of an office.

Remote employees in human resources, or what Google calls People Operations, who live within 50 miles of an office, are required to be in person on a hybrid basis by mid-April or their role will be eliminated, according to an internal memo. Staffers in that unit who are approved for remote work and live more than 50 miles away from an office can keep their current arrangements, but will have to go hybrid if they want new roles at the company.

Google previously offered a voluntary exit program to U.S.-based full-time employees in People Operations, starting in March, according to a memo sent by HR chief Fiona Cicconi in February.

That came after the company said in January that it would be offering voluntary exit packages to full-time employees in the U.S. in the Platforms and Devices group, which includes Android, Chrome and products like Fitbit and Nest. The unit has made cuts to nearly two-dozen teams as of this month. While internal correspondence indicated that remote work was a factor in the layoffs, Mencini said it was not a main consideration for the changes.

A year ago, Google combined its Android unit with its hardware group under the leadership of Rick Osterloh, a senior vice president. Osterloh said in January that the voluntary exit plan may be a fit for employees who struggle with the hybrid work schedule.

Mencini told CNBC that, since the groups merged, the team has “focused on becoming more nimble and operating more effectively and this included making some job reductions in addition to the voluntary exit program.” She added that the unit continues to hire in the U.S. and globally.

U.S. trucking is heading for a slowdown, with industry players fearing the “worst is yet to come” as tariffs start to crimp imports.

Trucking volumes have plunged to near pre-pandemic levels, according to Craig Fuller, founder of the logistics industry publication FreightWaves.

“With imports deteriorating, volumes are expected to fall by another 3-4% over the next month,” Fuller said Tuesday in a post on X, citing the real-time freight data platform Sonar, which he also founded. Fuller said that’s a worrying sign for truckers this year.

Container volumes are down 20% at the busy Port of Los Angeles since a year ago, FreightWaves reported Tuesday, saying “this downturn spells trouble” for trucking firms that ship the overseas cargo inland across the country. Freight trucks carrying goods out of the metro area are “converging downward toward 2020 lockdown levels,” the outlet said.

The flags come as warning signs pile up for the broader U.S. economy due to President Donald’s Trump’s evolving trade war.

The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday knocked down its forecast for the year, lowering its January projection for global gross domestic product growth to 2.8%, from 3.6% previously. The IMF also cut its outlook for U.S. growth to just 1.8%, down from 2.7%, citing “epistemic uncertainty and policy unpredictability” out of the White House. Fresh GDP data is due out next Wednesday.

Freight carriers are “heavily dependent on the health of the U.S. economy, and many industry insiders are waiting on the final outcome of tariffs prior to expressing opinions regarding their outlook,” said John Crum, head of specialty equipment finance at Wells Fargo.

Trucks are the nation’s freight mode of choice for everything from grain to gravel, as measured by weight, and also carry the lion’s share, by dollar value, of foodstuffs, electronics and vehicles, federal data shows. Imports accounted for 40% of freight tonnage moved domestically by truck as of 2023.

Despite freight firms’ broader reticence, many are still “expressing caution regarding freight volumes for 2025,” Crum said.

In a separate note, Wells Fargo supply chain finance managing director Jeremy Jansen said one silver lining is that companies “have a bit more profit margins than in 2018/19 to absorb some tariff actions.” 

The growing pessimism comes just months after industry experts were heralding a likely rebound in trucking volumes after two years of declines. Just days before Trump was sworn in to a second term in January, the American Trucking Association released a forecast projecting a 1.6% boost in freight for the year.

“Understanding the trends in our supply chain should be key for policymakers in Washington, in statehouses around the country and wherever decisions are being made that affect trucking and our economy,” ATA President and CEO Chris Spear said in a statement at the time.

But in the more than three months since then, consumers’ outlooks have nosedived, executives across industries have ramped up their warnings about slower sales, and Wall Street has swung wildly in response to ever-shifting signals about the administration’s trade agenda. Small-business owners say they’re doing their best to stockpile inventory before steeper tariffs take hold, even as many already get hit with higher bills from suppliers.

With much of Trump’s sweeping April 2 slate of tariffs temporarily rolled back, shipping volumes could jump in the second quarter “as consumers scoop up pre-tariff goods before prices go up,” logistics researchers at Cass Information Systems said in their March report. “But thereafter, the trade war is likely to extend the for-hire freight recession as higher prices reduce goods affordability and consumers’ real incomes.”

Overall U.S. exports rose 4.6% through February, federal researchers reported this month, while imports surged 21.4% as the trade war heated up.

The Cass Freight Index fell 5.5% in 2023 and 4.1% last year, “and so far, is trending toward another decline in 2025,” the analytics company said.

Mack Trucks recently announced layoffs of hundreds of workers at a Pennsylvania plant due to economic uncertainty, betting on slower demand for its iconic freight vehicles.

The decision drew sharp criticism last week from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who said, “I fear that we’re going to see more like this” due to tariffs. “We’re going to see more rising prices, more layoffs, more companies not investing in the future.”

“The economy has COVID,” Fuller wrote in a follow-up X post on Wednesday, in response to downbeat manufacturing data released this week. “The only cure is a deescalation of the tariffs.”