Home Stock market today: Chaos breaks out on Wall Street as Trump tariff fallout continues to rattle markets

Stock market today: Chaos breaks out on Wall Street as Trump tariff fallout continues to rattle markets

· April 7, 2025 · 0 Comment
  • A wild 20 minutes of trading that sent the S&P 500 (^GSPC) from bear market territory to being on track for its best single-day rise in more than two years, revealed two key things about the state of play right now.
  • For one, as our Alexandra Canal just highlighted, there is clearly a desperation among investors for the Trump Administration to step in and back off its firm tariff stance.
  • Secondly, it’s just utter chaos in markets right now. A headline that was never confirmed just sent the three major stock indexes on the kind of wild ride typically scene when a Youtuber is talking about GameStop (GME) on a live stream.
  • As Renaissance Macro head of economics Neil Dutta just wrote in an email, “The S&P 500 trading like Fartcoin is probably not a good thing.”
  • And for those wondering, Dutta isn’t being completely unserious here. Fartcoin (FARTCOIN-USD) is a real cryptocurrency with a volatile trading history.
  • In less than 15 minutes, markets drastically reversed gains after confusion emerged over whether or not President Trump was considering a 90-day pause on implementing reciprocal tariffs.
  • Just after 10 am ET, stocks skyrocketed from early losses, with the S&P 500 on track for its best day since November 2022.
  • The catalyst: Headlines that White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Trump would consider pausing the expected tariffs.
  • Only problem? He never actually said that. The White House later confirmed the headline was “fake news” in a post on X.
  • “I think the president is going to decide what the president is going to decide,” Hassett said in an interview with Fox News when asked specifically if Trump would consider a 90-day pause. Shortly after that clarity emerged, stocks sold off once again.
  • The takeaway: Markets are desperate for any sign of change from the administration, which has largely stayed the course. The “Trump put” is alive and well. But only if he chooses to use it.
  • Markets have been yearning for the Trump Administration to send a lifeline on tariffs. On Tuesday, it came via reports that National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Trump is considering a 90-day tariff delay.
  • The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) quickly rose more than 4% as the headline crossed, erasing significant losses from the open. With minutes, the tech-heavy gave back nearly all of those gains. At last check, the tech-heavy index was now down 0.8%.
  • A look at the Nasdaq chart below incapsulates the last 15 minutes of trading.
  • JPMorgan’s head of global equity strategy, Mislav Matejka, warned in a note Monday that three things need to happen for investors to feel comfortable buying again.
  • Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi reports:
  • Read more here.
  • President Trump appeared to try to calm markets on Monday morning after indicating the Trump administration is speaking with countries following his sweeping tariff announcement last week.
  • “Countries from all over the World are talking to us,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Tough but fair parameters are being set. Spoke to the Japanese Prime Minister this morning. He is sending a top team to negotiate! They have treated the U.S. very poorly on Trade. They don’t take our cars, but we take MILLIONS of theirs. Likewise Agriculture, and many other “things.” It all has to change, but especially with CHINA!!!”
  • The president made the remarks just a few minutes before the market open. Still, stocks opened in the red on Monday morning for a third day in a row of heavy selling.
  • US stocks slid for a third day in a row Monday amid a global stock fallout sparked last week following the Trump administration’s sweeping tariff policy.
  • The S&P 500 (^GSPC) fell over 3%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) retreating 4%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) tanked more than 1,200 points.
  • Stocks are continuing to sell off after their worst week since March 2020 as Trump signaled that he won’t change up his trade policy to relieve markets.
  • “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump told a reporter over the weekend.
  • Stocks briefly came off its pre-market lows after JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon’s remarks in a new 59-page shareholder letter on Monday, where he warned of the many uncertainties from the sweeping trade policies on investments, capital flows, corporate confidence, and the US dollar.
  • Oil continued to slide on Monday morning as fears of cratering demand steepened losses from last week.
  • “Magnificent Seven” stocks slid, led by declines in Tesla (TSLA), Nvidia (NVDA), and Apple (AAPL), as the European Union prepares its own set of countermeasures following China’s retaliatory levies announced last Friday.
  • President Trump has doubled down on his aggressive tariff policy, saying late Sunday that “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
  • His closest allies are supporting that narrative, even as the administration’s global tariff escalation threatens to send stocks into a bear market.
  • On Monday, White House economic advisor Peter Navarro said that tariffs will pay for the biggest tax cut in American history.
  • “Don’t get panicked out by all of this,” he said in an interview with CNBC. “The broadest-based tax cut in American history is coming in a matter of months. So any discussions of recession seem silly when you factor that in.”
  • Navarro also noted the recent movement in Treasury yields, with the 10-year (^TNX) falling as much as 20 basis points since Trump’s tariff announcement.
  • “The Fed is not going to do its job,” Navarro said. “But the long bond is doing it.”
  • Other members of the administration have also downplayed the impact on the US economy.
  • “Americans who want to retire right now — the Americans who put away for years in their savings accounts — I think they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations [in the stock market],” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in an interview with NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”
  • Bessent would be the likely voice to calm markets, RSM chief economist Joe Brusuelas told Yahoo Finance on Friday. So far, that hasn’t happened.
  • Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik argued that Trump’s protectionist agenda will restore domestic manufacturing jobs.
  • “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America,” he told CBS News’s “Face the Nation”.
  • None of those arguments have been enough to persuade investors, with stocks on track to take another large leg lower at Monday’s opening bell.
  • “Magnificent Seven” stocks are sliding premarket, led by declines in Tesla (TSLA), Nvidia (NVDA), and Apple (AAPL), after China announced retaliatory tariffs against the US and the European Union prepares its own set of countermeasures.
  • President Trump’s tariffs will likely continue to be highly disruptive to the tech trade, Apollo chief global economist Torsten Sløk wrote in a note on Monday morning. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.)
  • “Roughly 50% of earnings in the Magnificent 7 come from abroad,” Sløk wrote. “That is higher than for the S&P 500, where the share is 41%. With trade making up a bigger share of GDP in the rest of the world than in the US, the trade war will have a disproportionately more negative impact on the rest of the world.”
  • “As a result,” Sløk continued, “the Magnificent 7 will be hit harder on their global earnings than other S&P 500 companies. Their earnings could be even more negatively impacted if Europe retaliates in the form of a digital services tax.”
  • Here’s a look at how the Magnificent Seven tech stocks are trading:
  • With US stocks set to sink for a third day on Monday, President Trump posted on social media calling for the Fed to cut rates as markets tumble and some on Wall Street begin calling for the US economy to tip into recession this year.
  • “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION, and the long time abused USA is bringing in Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs that are already in place,” Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social.
  • “This is despite the fact that the biggest abuser of them all, China, whose markets are crashing, just raised its Tariffs by 34%, on top of its long term ridiculously high Tariffs (Plus!), not acknowledging my warning for abusing countries not to retaliate.”
  • The President’s sweeping retaliatory tariff announcement last week sparked a sell-off in stocks. China announced 34% tariffs against US imports in retaliation to Trump’s levies.
  • Nasdaq futures were sinking on Monday morning after sliding into a bear market last week, while the S&P 500 was also lower after losing more than 10% over a span of two days.
  • Oil prices also sank more than 2.5% on Monday, extending its losses of 11% last week.
  • Global stocks tumbled on Monday morning with the Hang Seng China Enterprises (^HSCE) index, tumbling more than 13%. The Japanese Nikkei 225 entered a bear market on Monday as it closed 7.8% lower, bringing its losses since a December high to 23%.
  • Stocks in Europe slumped to levels not seen in well over a year as Trump’s tariff push left investors in no mood to take risks.
  • The pan-European Stoxx 600 benchmark (^STOXX) fell almost 4.3% to its lowest level since January 2024, coming off session lows that saw it slide as much as 6.5%.
  • All sectors on the Stoxx 600 pulled back, with defense names leading the decline as investors sold big recent gainers such as Rheinmetall (RHM.DE, RNMBF). The bank, energy, and insurance sectors also took a hit.
  • “There’s just a general sense of panic,” said Daniel Murray, Zurich-based chief executive officer of EFG Asset Management told Bloomberg. “Everything is getting killed, even good companies that will likely fare relatively well.”
  • Germany’s Dax (^GDAXI) dropped 4.4%, while the CAC 40 (^FCHI) in Paris slid 4.6%. London’s FTSE 100(^FTSE) retreated 3.8%.
  • An increasing number of Wall Street strategists are flipping their stance on stocks in 2025 as stock sell-off in reaction to President Trump’s latest tariff announcements.
  • On Sunday night, Oppenheimer chief investment strategist John Stoltzfus cut his year-end S&P 500 target to 5,950 from 7,100. Stoltzfus had entered 2025 as the most bullish strategist on Wall Street.
  • “While our expectations are for cooler heads to prevail in the trade negotiation process that’s likely to follow last week’s tariff regime announcements the market’s reactions and percentage of recent declines in some individual stocks (as well as among major equity indices) suggests to us a need to right size expectations in the near term,” Stoltzfus wrote.
  • With futures tied to the major indexes all down more than 3% again ahead of Monday’s market open, Stoltzfus noted that a “negative pitch book” has taken hold among investors. That pitch book, Stoltzfus wrote, “seemingly projects negative outcomes to infinity.”
  • Amid the massive sell-off that’s pushed the benchmark index down more than 17% from its most recent all-time high on Feb. 19, Julian Emanuel, who leads the equity, derivatives, and quantitative strategy team at Evercore ISI, also lowered his year-end S&P 500 target to 5,600 from 6,800 previously.
  • Evercore is now one of three equity strategy teams tracked by Yahoo Finance that has reversed course from seeing a positive return for the S&P 500 to projecting a negative year for stocks as Trump’s hefty tariffs ripple through the stock market.
  • Emanuel wrote that prolonged policy uncertainty has already raised asset volatility and hit the confidence of both consumers and businesses. Eventually, Emanuel believes continued uncertainty that’s already weighed on survey data like consumer confidence could trickle into other economic data points. This would result in either stagflation, where inflation increases and growth slows, or an “outright recession.”
  • “Investors, CEOs and Consumers dislike uncertainty,” Emanuel wrote.
  • Stocks in Asia tanked on Monday to close near levels not seen in some cases since the 2008 global financial crisis, with the Hang Seng Index (^HSI) the hardest hit.
  • The Hong Kong gauge closed 13.2% lower to notch its worst daily loss since 1997 and to erase all its gains for 2025 so far. Meanwhile, the Hang Seng China Enterprises (^HSCE) index, which lists companies such as Alibaba (BABA, 9988.HK) and BYD (BYDDF, 1211.HK), tumbled 13.7% as shares of all its components fell.
  • Meanwhile, the CSI 300 (000300.SS) index in Shanghai sank 7%, as an “element of panic selling” hit stocks, according to a Janus Henderson strategist.
  • In Taiwan, the Taiex pulled back 9.7% to book its worst day since 1990 as Apple suppliers TSMC (TSM, 2330.TW) and Foxconn (2317.TW) took a hit.
  • The Nikkei 225 entered a bear market on Monday as it closed 7.8% lower, bringing its losses since a December high to 23%.
  • The fast-moving slide in stocks during the session prompted a circuit-breaker in trading, per The Wall Street Journal.
  • The last time the Japanese blue-chip benchmark was in a bear market was in August, when the Bank of Japan’s surprise interest-rate hike sent shockwaves through markets.
  • Concerns about the impact of the trade war on Japan’s industries and broader economy are mounting. The country’s prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, will speak with President Trump on a call later Monday, according to reports.
  • JPMorgan believes the US economy will enter a recession in the back half of 2025 as the impact of President Trump tariffs takes hold in the economy.
  • The firm’s chief US economist Michael Feroli sees a two-quarter recession occurring in the back half of 2025 as GDP contracts by 1% in the third quarter of the year and by 0.5% in the fourth quarter. For the full-year 2025, Feroli’s team projects GDP will fall by 0.3%.
  • “We now expect real GDP [gross domestic product] to contract under the weight of the tariffs,” Feroli wrote in a note to clients on Friday night.
  • Feroli added that a “recession in economic activity” will push the unemployment rate up to 5.3%. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday showed the unemployment rate stood at 4.2% in March. While other economists have noted the risks to recession are rising, JPMorgan marks the first major Wall Street research team to forecast a recession as Trump’s tariffs weigh on economic growth.
  • “The pinch from higher prices that we expect in coming months may hit harder than in the post-pandemic inflation spike, as nominal income growth has been moderating recently, as opposed to accelerating in the earlier episode,” Feroli wrote. “Moreover, in an environment of heightened uncertainty consumers may be reluctant to dip too far into savings to finance spending growth.”
  • Some of President Trump’s prominent backers in the business community are sounding the alarm on his rollout of reciprocal tariffs and the resulting market fallout.
  • Outspoken billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who endorsed the president last July following the assassination attempt on Trump, said in a lengthy post on X late Sunday that, barring Trump calling a “time out” on his tariffs plans, we could be headed for an “economic nuclear winter.”
  • “The President has an opportunity on Monday to call a time out and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system,” Ackman wrote.
  • “Alternatively, we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down.
  • “May cooler heads prevail.”
  • In his post, Ackman argued the US is “100% behind the president on fixing a global system of tariffs that has disadvantaged the country.”
  • “But,” Ackman added, “business is a confidence game and confidence depends on trust.”
  • On Sunday evening, stock futures were pointing to a third day of sharp losses after the S&P 500 (^GSPC) fell over 10% across Thursday and Friday’s trading sessions, while the Nasdaq (^IXIC) entered a bear market.
  • Trump’s reciprocal tariff announcements on Wednesday, dubbed “Liberation Day” by the White House, surprised investors and exceeded most Wall Street forecasts. Initial estimates put the combined tariff rate on all US imports well north of 20%, which would be the highest in over a century.
  • Wall Street strategists have slashed their forecasts for the stock market in response to Trump’s tariff plan and at least one firm has called for the US to enter recession this year as a result.
  • Ackman said Trump’s rollout of these tariffs has set in motion a “process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.”
  • Instead, Ackman is calling on Trump to institute a 90-day time out to begin negotiations on “unfair asymmetric tariff deals, and induce trillions of dollars of new investment in our country.”
  • “If, on the other hand, on April 9th we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world,” Ackman wrote, “business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.
  • “What CEO and what board of directors will be comfortable making large, long-term, economic commitments in our country in the middle of an economic nuclear war?
  • “I don’t know of one who will do so?”
  • Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, President Trump said sometimes you have to take medicine when asked about the market’s recent sell-off, according to Reuters.
  • The president added that his policies were not intentionally trying to engineer a market sell-off.
  • “I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” he said.
  • Trump’s comments come as markets appeared set to begin the week where they left off Friday, with US stock futures down sharply across the board with Nasdaq 100 futures off more than 4% and futures tied to the Dow and S&P 500 both off more than 3.4%.
  • Last week, the Nasdaq closed in a bear market and the S&P 500’s losses reached 17% from the benchmark index’s record high hit back in February.
  • This weekend, Trump’s economic surrogates attempted to make clear in media appearances that the president’s shock tariff announcements last week were not a negotiation tactic.
  • Speaking Sunday evening, the president said no deal on tariffs with China would be forthcoming unless the US’ trade deficit with China was fixed. The US’ trade deficit with China reached $295 billion last year.
  • Trump added that he has spoken to leaders in Europe and Asia regarding his tariffs unveiled last week.
  • In China, investors braced for a tough day as markets reopened after an extended weekend, absorbing the impact of Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs on US goods.
  • A gauge of Chinese stocks listed in the US plunged 8.9% on Friday, reflecting fears of further trade tensions. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, (^HSCE) one of the year’s top performers, has begun a sharp pullback, dropping 9.4%
  • Meanwhile, the Nikkei 225 (^N225) fell nearly 8%, putting it at its lowest levels since 2023.
  • China’s swift tariff response, following President Trump’s tariff hike on the country, raised global recession fears. Goldman Sachs downgraded its targets for Chinese equity indices, with the MSCI China (CHH=F) Index target cut to 81 from 85.
  • Read more here.
  • TOKYO (Reuters) – Oil prices fell more than 3% on Monday, extending losses from the previous week, on growing concerns that a global trade war could slow the global economy and weaken oil demand, following China’s retaliation against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
  • Read more here.
  • Our tariff live blog has been running throughout the weekend, and it has a lot of the context you need to know heading into the trading week.
  • The key theme is that Trump administration officials struck a defiant tone on the president’s tariff plans. A sampling, per our accounting:
  • See the latest updates here.

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