BEIJING — Citi on Tuesday became one of the first investment firms to lower its China growth forecast on escalating trade tensions with the U.S.

In less than a week, U.S. tariffs on goods from China have more than doubled, while Beijing has hit back with more duties and restrictions on U.S. businesses.

Citi analysts cut their forecast for China’s gross domestic product to 4.2% this year, down by 0.5 percentage point, as they see “little scope for a deal between the U.S. and China after recent escalations.”

Natixis on Monday also told reporters the firm was cutting its China GDP forecast to 4.2% this year, down from 4.7% previously.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have not yet cut their forecasts, but warned this week of increasing downside risks to their expectation — currently both predict 4.5% growth.

China in March announced its official growth target would be “around 5%” for 2025, but stressed that it would not be easy to reach the goal.

“The main issue is that uncertainty for the economy is rising,” Hao Zhou, chief economist at Guotai Junan International, said Tuesday in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. He noted that visibility on future growth had dropped significantly, while U.S. tariffs might keep on rising.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced an additional 50% in tariffs on Chinese goods entering the U.S. will take effect Wednesday after Beijing raised duties on all U.S. products by 34%. As part of its plan for sweeping tariffs on multiple countries, the White House last week had said it would add a 34% levy on Chinese goods.

Combined with two rounds of 10% tariff increases earlier this year, new U.S. tariffs on Chinese products in 2025 have reached 104%.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Tuesday said that a February hack of its email systems qualified as a “major incident” and exposed “highly sensitive information.”

The breach, first disclosed and resolved in February, involved information related to the “financial condition of federally regulated financial institutions used in its examinations and supervisory oversight processes.”

The OCC, an agency that regulates and supervises national banks, said that it learned of the incident on Feb. 11, and shut off compromised administrative accounts the next day. The regulator said it is using external cybersecurity experts for a full review of the incident and is launching a review of its IT security policies to prevent further attacks.

“I have taken immediate steps to determine the full extent of the breach and to remedy the long-held organizational and structural deficiencies that contributed to this incident,” said Acting Comptroller of the Currency Rodney Hood.

“There will be full accountability for the vulnerabilities identified and any missed internal findings that led to the unauthorized access,” he added.

Hackers had access to more than 150,000 emails from June 2023 until earlier this year, Bloomberg reported earlier, citing people with knowledge of the matter.