The S&P 500 retreated on Monday, extending February’s rout and turning red for the year after President Donald Trump’s confirmation of forthcoming tariffs ratcheted up economic concerns.
The S&P 500 fell 2.1%, bringing its year-to-date performance to a loss of nearly 1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 789 points, or 1.8%. The Nasdaq Composite slid 3%, weighed down by Nvidia’s decline of more than 9%.
All three indexes traded higher earlier in the session, with the Dow at one point up nearly 200 points. Stocks took a notable leg down in afternoon trading following Trump’s reiteration that 25% levies on imports from Mexico and Canada would go into effect on Tuesday, dashing investors’ hopes of a last-minute deal to avert the full tariffs on the two U.S. allies.
The Atlanta Federal Reserve GDPNow is estimating that Q1 GDP is -2.8%. Originally it was predicted to be +2%.
Get used to it. The US isn’t just shooting itself in the foot, it’s creating a ball pit full of mines and jumping in head first.
Such a great idea Trump you are our glorious leader I am sure it will all work out great! or not.
I must be the ultimate fiscal pessimist because my portfolio always seems to be doing the best when everything else is red.
I wanna see a politician campaign on creating a weak economy.
Crash the housing market! Make the billionaires lose money! Collapse the oil industry!
Kind of biased to assume those things would happen in a weak economy or that the opposite are signs of strong economy, tbh.
The fun has only just begun.
Once they learn all the money goes toward corporate tax cuts?
Go ahead and sell, the only thing this hurts is the dollar as the reserve currency. Like social security we can run on its downfall.
I wonder how close we are to Trump declaring that “no one knew” how complicated the economy is…
Pfft, never. He’s never apologized or admitted any wrongdoing as far as I’m aware. He’s too narcissistic for that.
Ahhhh. Yeah, makes sense now. Thanks.
He did say “Who knew Healthcare was so hard?” the first time around. That’s what the person was harking to.
He had that two weeks plan though… That was in 2016…any day now
Don’t forget infrastructure week. Surely this will be the week?
This time around he promised nothing outside of tariffs, and outsourced everything to Elon. And Elon is 100% there to dismantle, they don’t plan to fix or add/contribute anything.
It’s amazing the destruction they have caused already and Donnie hasn’t had to do anything but write his name in sharpie over and over.
He’s doing this on purpose so the oligarchs can buy the dip and own even more.
Don’t mistake malice for incompetence, or vice versa. Trump is often incompetent, especially in live interactions, his tariff game ain’t it, it’s part of all he’s there for: self-enrichment.
He already called them on and back off once this term to do just that. Calling such moves idiocy instead of a plan to further drain wealth from the many to the pre-informed few plays right into it.
Yet another example of why the capital markets are the bane of human civilization in innumerable ways, undermining and sabotaging entire societies to accelerate short term growth/metastasis.
The capital markets will be destroyed either by the people out of self preservation, or by capital market made climate change after it doesn’t matter anymore for humans. I take solace in knowing this con game won’t last another century either way, as the tumor of unchecked human greed will destroy its own host if not cut out by force.
Oh, it’s much worse than that.
All that park land sold to the wealthy.
USD becomes worthless.
Network states - city states of the rich.
Destroying the central banking system (not bad, but in this context will cause untold death and suffering)
Privatized everything.
Crypto.
The complete dismantling of american hegemony (not a bad thing, necessarily, but to do it by placating Putin is not the way) and financial dominance.
Complete and absolute surveillance. Always. In everything. (X app/starlink)
Christian dominionism. Not just nationalism.
The end of western society.
It’s much worse than just markets.
It’s Armageddon.
Get ready. Conservatives who have boasted the economy doing well when the stock market ever went up are going to start telling you how the stock market isn’t a metric for the true economy
Doesn’t matter. They immediately forgot the 2018 Trump slump, and the covid economic disaster he made worse. Republicans have been continuously proving how terrible they are for the economy for over half a century, and voters won’t take a hint
You’re not wrong but I don’t know why we bother pointing this stuff out anymore. If there’s anyone out there still expecting consistency from conservatives they aren’t paying attention at all, which means they’ll never see any post pointing out the inconsistency.
There’s millions of young people who are just starting to pay attention. We continue to point out the hipocrasy for them. Lest their only point of reference come from the conservatives.
I suppose that’s fair. It still bums me out though.
I’m surprised any of these companies are actually onboard with his stupid ideas… he’s going to tank everything and make everyone starve and lose their housing. L…unless that’s the plan to steal all property then sell it to putin
the company heads the ceo , c-suites have been operating on getting thier golde parachutes and bouncing for years
you got it. The rich are about to buy all the assets you need to sell to pay for eggs and then rent them back to you in perpetuity .
Crassus used to buy burning houses.
[H]e’s going to tank everything and make everyone starve and lose their housing.
Not everyone.
Dead people make poor servants. You can’t even boss them around.
They make great incentives to the living servants.
Eat the rich.
Either Trump is an idiot, the voters are idiots, or everyone is an idiot. This may be a good time to plug
I’d give reasonable odds that he spends a lot of time talking about tariffs and making extraordinary statements about tariffs to keep himself in the news and associated with them in the public’s mind, but doesn’t impose or imposes for only a short term said tariffs.
The goal with tariffs is domestic politics, where his core supporters and swing state voters care a lot about low-skill manufacturing jobs. As he showed during term 1, he is extremely willing to engage in political theater to create impressions among the voting public that radically diverge from what he is actually doing on policy. The bulk of the people he wants to influence are not going to actually go dig up trade statistics, and you note that he is very long on emotion and breaking communications norms and very short on things like concrete goals and dollar figures.
He did not spend time negotiating with Mexico or Canada on specific items. He just hauled off and started talking very loudly about tariffs, which got him lots and lots of media eyeball time. Earned media, in political science terms.
Remember immigration, first term? Lots of extraordinary statements about “The Wall”. Even less movement on things than back when Bush Jr. was doing the same shtick and called it “The Fence”. We’re getting lots of photos of people posing with immigration raids, and not a whole lot by way of statistics. If farm output in the US collapses, then you’ll know that the illegal immigrant population is substantially gone. I do not anticipate that happening.
On trade policy in his first term, he spent his time mostly loudly giving the impression that he would end NAFTA, while much-more-quietly saying “or negotiate a much better deal”. What he actually did was rename NAFTA and slightly tweak it.
At the beginning of his term, he took credit for killing the TTIP and TPP free trade agreements, made a huge deal out of it. He did not do this – negotiations had failed under Obama. But that had nothing to do with the impression he intended to give via political theater.
The problem the GOP basically faces is that it needs votes from a significant chunk of people to get political power, but doesn’t have much interest in enacting the policies that those people want (which are generally, I would say, not very good policies). Instead of trying to make a case for not enacting them, the Trump strategy is to give those people the impression that their favored policies are, in fact, being put into place.
The problem the GOP basically faces is that it needs votes from a significant chunk of people to get political power, but doesn’t have much interest in enacting the policies that those people want (which are generally, I would say, not very good policies).
Oh, the GOP figured out that one good. Give those folks someone to hate, and they will happily screw themselves if it also screws over those people they hate. People will happily vote against their own interests to hurt people they think need hurting.
Yeah, the “take government benefits away from those people” thing that winds up substantially impacting the people voting for it is cute too.
I remember this analysis of Trump appeal from his first term:
https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/story-of-trumps-appeal
This descriptive portrait of Trump supporters is consistent with an influential explanation for Trump’s appeal, particularly among white working class voters in communities that have seen better days. According to sociologist Arlie Hochschild,(iii) this is the “deep story” these individuals tell themselves to make sense of their world:
You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.
An honest take there is that there was a period of time where the US had industrialized, where much of the rest of the industrialized world had destroyed iself in two world wars, some of it lacked the infrastructure for industry, and a lot of the rest of it was hamstrung by command economies. In that time, there was enormous demand for US low-skill manufacturing labor. The world bought goods manufactured in the US.
Markets allocate labor by using prices. If there is a shortage of labor in an area, wages rise, and labor flows into that area. A surplus, and wages drop, and people exit. Still happens – look at the North Dakota oil boom, where wages shot way up for people willing to work there.
In the 1950s, you could, if you were willing to live and work in a US manufacturing center, stick item A into part B on a line and earn a wage that was higher than the typical wage in much of the rest of the US, and much higher than the rest of the world.
The problem is that the economic conditions that created that environment are long-gone, and are not coming back. Labor-intensive manufacturing is an area where the US is especially uncompetitive now. The world does not want the output of a costly American assembly-line worker when someone in Indonesia has the same requisite skillset.
There is no magic Make America Great Again button that is going to turn the US into a (much wealthier, because the same people aren’t going to want a 1950s standard of living) 2025 version of 1950s America.
So now the fallback idea is “well, maybe lets create artificial demand for something that the US isn’t all that good at doing by preventing anyone else from competing for the domestic market. We will impose high tariffs, effectively tax all non-manufacturing workers, and transfer wealth from them to American manufacturing workers”. The problem there is that there is very limited willingness to do that. It is not in the US’s interest to do that, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any intention to do that. Trump, however, is at least willing to go to great lengths to give the impression that he is doing so.
The dow losing 600 points is barely 1.5%. We had a swing in 2015 that was over a thousand, and the stock market was fine. This will be news when it tumbles like 20% and we start seeing large sell offs and bank runs.
This is just initial reaction to an announcement. The tariffs aren’t even implemented yet.
Right, but it’s also not an indicator of anything yet.
Yeah, but tarrifs are one of dozens if not hundreds of things that are going to be hurting the economy.
Youve already got tens of thousands of federal workers now unemployed, likely disruptions to Medicaid/snap/social security, tarrifs (and likely trade consequences of tarrifs), low consumer confidence, and it hasn’t even been two months.
If anyone thinks this is going to be a good year for the markets, I’d love to know why. The only reason they might stay high is due to corporate benefits from the admin as the regular people suffer.
That’s okay - he can fix it with tariffs on stock trading, tariffs on recession and extra tariffs on poverty, right? Because tariffs are a panacea for everything!
America, prepare to pay tariffs on your monumental stupidity - you thought it was bad now? Then hold on to your butts. The rest of the world will also suffer with you, but we won’t have it nearly as bad as you guys…
I really want it to fucking plummet. Americans need to feel this idiots damage
Good thing egg prices are down!
Fucking finally
oh the humanity. If you had put your money in january of this year you would only get the same amount back if you took it out!!!
