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.”
Could this whole situation really be as simple as the largest scale “pump-and-dump” ever?
No, because the damage he has done is ongoing and could literally bring the USD down from the preferred security of the world economy.
And if he does that, then all that speculative wealth in our still-inflated stock market is worth tittlywinks.
They’re gonna cash it out in RMB, not leave it in US stocks.
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Ah. Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Yup, I have to repeat Hanlon’s Razor daily, it’s sort of become a mantra.
I like on CNBC tried to cut him short when he said what he said. Was watching it live since I’ve been enjoying this whole melt down.
While CNBC has been kind of neutral but trying to justify the means to the end this guy came up and said it like it is. We are close if not already in a recession thanks to these idiots.
This is a question for anyone:
I can’t find a good definition of a fiscal recession. I understand that it involves “multiple months of downward trends” on things like GDP.
Exactly how long does the downturn have to last before they declare that it is officially a period of recession? Is it really just 2 months or more?
It’s usually two quarters. By the time we are officially in recession we have been for half a year.
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.
Yeah, I don’t think the GDP is a great defining factor of economic emergency, in that words like “recession” have to be declared before the country treats the problem seriously. Assuming that growth is going to happen forever in a finite world is naive. And there are serious problems in the economy happening despite the GDP, like increasing poverty and lack of education or healthcare.
So like, my frustration is that “recession” has to be said before the government freaks out and attempts to fix things, but things are already really bad in ways that matter far more.
Now that Trump’s fucking with rich people it’ll be interesting to see if the millionaire class does anything about it. I still doubt they will.
Call it ‘strategic leverage’ all you want, but when your move tanks the market and raises insider trading red flags, it starts to look less like policy and more like profiteering in a patriotic hat. 😏
The stink of the Orange Turds policies are still hitting the markets.
Idk what they’re on about. The five day for NASDEQ is basically 0% rn
So, I’m assuming that you mean ^NDX, the NASDAQ 100 index.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/^NDX/
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A lot of the drop was from the beginning of the month and the five-day period misses that but included rebound from that as Trump announced suspension of the global tariffs.
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The NASDAQ 100 reflects a narrower — if important — sector of the economy; it weights tech companies more heavily. The S&P 500 (^GSPC) (large companies) and Russell 2000 (^RUT) (smaller companies) took a larger hit.
Trump’s announcement was on April 2nd.
From April 2nd to today:
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^NDX is down 6.3%.
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^GSPC is down 7.1%.
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^RUT is down 10.4%.
If I’d had to guess, American tech companies — with a heavier representation in the NASDAQ 100 — probably are generally less exposed to the cost of importing goods to the US than are most US companies, though as global companies that export, they certainly stand to be hit by things like countertariffs.
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