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.
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.
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
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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.
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
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.