Dow drops nearly 1,680 in biggest wipeout since 2020 as fears of fallout from tariffs shake markets
apnews.com
Financial markets around the world reeled following President Donald Trump’s latest and most severe set of tariffs, and the U.S. stock market took the worst of it.

Everything from crude oil to Big Tech stocks to the value of the U.S. dollar against other currencies fell. Even gold, which has hit records recently as investors sought something safer to own, pulled lower. Some of the worst hits walloped smaller U.S. companies, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks dropped 5.9% to pull it more than 20% below its record.

Wall Street had long assumed Trump would use tariffs merely as a tool for negotiations with other countries, rather than as a long-term policy. But Wednesday’s announcement may suggest Trump sees tariffs more as helping to solve an ideological goal than just an opening bet in a poker game. Trump on Wednesday talked about wresting manufacturing jobs back to the United States, a process that could take years.

If Trump follows through on his tariffs, stock prices may need to fall much more than 10% from their all-time high in order to reflect the recession that could follow, along with the hit to profits that U.S. companies could take. The S&P 500 is now down roughly 11% from its record set in February.

“Markets may actually be underreacting, especially if these rates turn out to be final, given the potential knock-on effects to global consumption and trade,” said Sean Sun, portfolio manager at Thornburg Investment Management, though he sees Trump’s announcement on Wednesday as more of an opening move than an endpoint for policy.

  • Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    13·
    1 day ago

    The evidence that Trump’s Administration themselves cited in their official explanation of their tariff “calculations” (trade deficit / imports) flat out states that when the US tries to tariff other countries:

    1. American importers pay for the US tariff AND
    2. American exporters pay for the foreign retaliatory tariffs.

    The source (Cavallo et al, 2021) clearly demonstrates that American tariffs are paid directly by Americans in both directions, meaning out of everyone on Earth, US tariffs screw the US the most. Trump’s administration legitimized the source by citing that research for its calculations on the tariff rates.

    The Trade Representative’s explanation freely admits that the stupid parameters were chosen more or less arbitrarily, and they cited the paper to justify their position on tariff price throughput but conveniently didn’t list it in their “References” section.

    Our analyses indicate that the price incidence of US import tariffs falls largely on the United States… Our results suggest that retailers are absorbing a significant share of the increase in the cost of affected imports by earning lower profit margins on those goods… [These analyses reveal] that the recent tariffs applied by foreign governments on US exports have affected total foreign import prices far less than was the case for the recent US tariffs

      • Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        9·
        23 hours ago

        Plenty of people supported Coolidge and Hoover until they felt it in their wallets. This is going to hurt, for everyone, and it will provide opportunities to change minds. Not just the minds of Trump supporters, but the minds of everyone who thinks there’s no point fighting. We have a lot of common ground opening up beneath our feet.

        This is a terrible mistake for them to make. The Republican party has made this mistake before. It lead to the New Deal. History sure is rhyming, and things aren’t playing out quite the same, but we have a chance - however small it is - to take advantage of their mistake again, and turn things around.