Financial markets around the world are reeling Thursday following President Donald Trump’s latest and most severe set of tariffs, and the U.S. stock market is taking the worst of it so far.
The S&P 500 was down 4% in midday trading, more than other major stock markets, and at its bottom in the morning was on track for its worst day since COVID struck in 2020. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1,318.72 points, or 3.12%, as of 1:53 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 5.16% lower.
Little was spared in financial markets as fear flared globally about the potentially toxic mix of higher inflation and weakening economic growth that tariffs can create.
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.
Investors worldwide knew Trump was going to announce a sweeping set of tariffs late Wednesday, and fears surrounding it had already pulled Wall Street’s main measure of health, the S&P 500 index, 10% below its all-time high. But Trump still managed to surprise them with “the worst case scenario for tariffs,” according to Mary Ann Bartels, chief investment officer at Sanctuary Wealth.
Trump announced a minimum tariff of 10% on imports, with the tax rate running much higher on products from certain countries like China and those from the European Union. It’s “plausible” the tariffs altogether, which would rival levels unseen in roughly a century, could knock down U.S. economic growth by 2 percentage points this year and raise inflation close to 5%, according to UBS.
Such a hit would be so frightening that it “makes one’s rational mind regard the possibility of them sticking as low,” according to Bhanu Baweja and other strategists at UBS.