Sell-off comes amid anger from Democrats over retreat that rattled markets, while Republicans praise Trump’s ‘art of the deal’ in action

Summary

U.S. stocks tumbled Thursday as market volatility continued after Trump’s abrupt 90-day tariff pause and raised tariffs on Chinese imports to 145%.

On CNN, former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called Trump’s economic policies the “worst self-inflicted wound” an administration had ever imposed on a “well-functioning economy.”

The Dow dropped 2.5%, Nasdaq 4%, and S&P 500 3.4%. Trump tried to defend the move as strategic leverage.

Critics condemned the chaos and raised insider trading concerns after Trump told subscribers it was a “great time to buy.”

  • talEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    Also, it’s not two quarters of the stock market being down, but GDP. What’s being talked about in this article is the stock market. I mean, yeah, they’re linked, but the stock market is going to be considerably more-volatile and reflects investor beliefs about future economic activity. After some bouncing around, the S&P 500 is down something like 10% as of today since the beginning of the month. US GDP has not dropped 10% in the past week-and-a-half.

    EDIT:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okun's_law

    Okun’s law states that a one-point increase in the cyclical unemployment rate is associated with two percentage points of negative growth in real GDP.

    If we’d had the GDP fall off by 10% in the past week and a half, we’d expect something like one in twenty Americans to have lost their jobs in the past week and a half.

    EDIT2: I checked in another comment, and just to correct “something like 10%”, the S&P 500 is down 7.1% from April 2nd, the day Trump made his announcement.