'Panic and paralysis': U.S. firms fret despite China tariff reprieve

"The only option is to try to keep your head above water and be tossed by the waves, or to go out of business," said Anna Barker, whose Mississippi-based firm Glo sells luminous toys designed in the United States and made in China. The world's two biggest economies however agreed at talks last weekend in Switzerland to temporarily lower the levies, bringing U.S. tariffs down to 30 percent and China's corresponding duties to 10 percent. For Barker's start-up Glo, born of a school project in Mississippi where she and her business partner were college students, the answer for now may be expanding outside the United States.