Future
Does Trump Have an ‘Off Ramp’?
With global markets again in free-fall, the president appeared to be losing support of business leaders, raising questions about his leverage in his trade fight.
The S&P 500 looks precariously close to plunging into a bear market today.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times
No letup in sight
Frenzied selling is gripping global markets for a third straight session, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures deeply in the red, along with a clobbering in European and Asian stocks, as President Trump digs in on tariffs. A new wave of duties is set to take effect this week that could further upset global markets.
Trump continues to say he doesn’t care about the stock markets. But last week’s greater than $5 trillion hit to the S&P 500 may be weakening his hand as talks continue with U.S. trading partners. And business leaders — even those that had supported the president’s agenda heading into last week’s tariff announcement — are growing publicly anxious about whether Trump can manage to find an off ramp.
Here’s the latest: Crypto, oil, most commodities and the dollar are all lower. The S&P 500 is on the brink of entering a bear market, defined as falling more than 20 percent from its mid-February highs. Analysts at Morgan Stanley warn that another drop of up to 8 percent is possible.
The Cboe Volatility Index, Wall Street’s so-called fear gauge, spiked on Monday to a level last seen in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Fed seems in no hurry to bail out investors. Jay Powell, the central bank’s chair, signaled on Friday that the inflationary effects of “the significantly larger than expected” tariffs have put the central bank in wait-and-see mode.
What will Trump do next? For now, the president said that despite the market plunges, he intends to stay the course. “I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” he told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, returning from a golf-filled weekend in Florida.
