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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe U.S. stock market’s selloff is worsening Monday as Wall Street questions how much pain President Donald Trump is willing for the economy to endure in order to get what he wants.
The S&P 500 was down 2.1% in midday trading, coming off its worst week since September. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 405 points, or 0.9%, as of 11:20 a.m., and the Nasdaq composite was 3.6% lower.
The main measure of the U.S. stock market is on track for a seventh swing of more than 1%, up or down, in the last eight days following a scary stretch dominated by Trump’s on -and- off -again tariffs. The worry is that the whipsaw moves will either hurt the economy directly or create enough uncertainty to drive U.S. companies and consumers into an economy-freezing paralysis.
The S&P 500 is down 8% from its all-time high set on Feb. 19.
The economy has already given some signals of weakening, mostly through surveys showing increased pessimism. And a widely followed collection of real-time indicators compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta suggests the U.S. economy might already be shrinking.
Asked over the weekend whether he was expecting a recession in 2025, Trump told Fox News Channel: “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing.” He then added, “It takes a little time. It takes a little time.”
Trump says he wants to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, among other reasons he’s given for tariffs. His Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has also said the economy may go through a “detox” period as it weans itself off an addiction to spending by the government.
The U.S. job market is still showing stable hiring at the moment, to be sure, and the economy ended last year running at a solid rate. But economists are marking down their forecasts for how the economy will perform this year.
At Goldman Sachs, for example, David Mericle cut his estimate for U.S. economic growth to 1.7% from 2.2% for the end of 2025 over the year before, largely because tariffs look like they’ll be bigger than he was previously forecasting.
He sees a one-in-five chance of a recession over the next year, raising it only slightly because “the White House has the option to pull back policy changes” if the risks to the economy “begin to look more serious.”
“There are always multiple forces at work in the market, but right now, almost all of them are taking a back seat to tariffs,” according to Chris Larkin, managing director, trading and investing, at E-Trade from Morgan Stanley.
The worries hitting Wall Street have so far been hurting some of its biggest stars the most. Big Tech stocks and companies that rode the artificial-intelligence frenzy in recent years have slumped sharply.
Nvidia fell another 4.9% Monday to bring its loss for the year so far to 20.2%. It’s a steep drop-off from its nearly 820% surge over 2023 and 2024.
Elon Musk’s Tesla fell 8.7% to deepen its loss for 2025 to more than 40%. After getting an initial post-election bump on hopes that Musk’s close relationship with Trump would help the electric-vehicle company, the stock has since slumped on worries that its brand has become intertwined with Musk. Protests against the U.S. government’s efforts to cull its workforce and other moves have targeted Tesla dealerships, for example.
Stocks of companies that depend on U.S. households feeling good enough about their finances to spend also tumbled sharply. United Airlines lost 8.3%, and cruise-ship operator Carnival fell 8.2%.
It’s not just stocks struggling. Investors are sending prices lower for all kinds of investments whose momentum had earlier seemed nearly impossible to stop at times, such as bitcoin. The cryptocurrency’s value has dropped back toward $80,000 from more than $106,000 in December.
Instead, investors have been herding into U.S. Treasury bonds as they look for things whose prices can hold up better when the economy is under pressure. That has sent prices for Treasury bonds sharply higher, which in turn has sent down their yields.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury tumbled again to 4.21% from 4.32% late Friday. It’s been dropping since January, when it was approaching 4.80%, as worries about the economy have grown. That’s a major move for the bond market.
All the uncertainty, though, hasn’t shut down dealmaking on Wall Street. Redfin’s stock jumped 68.1% after Rocket said it would buy the digital real estate brokerage in an all-stock deal valuing it at $1.75 billion. Rocket’s stock sank 14.9%.
ServiceNow fell 6.3% after the AI platform company said it was buying AI-assistant maker Moveworks for $2.85 billion in cash and stock.
In stock markets abroad, European indexes largely fell following a mixed session in Asia.
Indexes fell 1.8% in Hong Kong and 0.2% in Shanghai after China said consumer prices fell in February for the first time in 13 months. It’s the latest signal of weakness for the world’s second-largest economy, as persistent weak demand was compounded by the early timing of the Lunar New Year holiday.
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More winning bigly.
Since the tariffs haven’t even had a real impact yet, seems like the Wall Street kids are playing speculation of what if, fear of what maybe, panic of the unknown, partisan disagreements and punishment, and retribution for some stocks they decided not to like.
This is part of the real impact, Kevin.
Wtf do you think the stock market is? It’s buying and selling shares and goods based on FUTURES. Literally speculation. You’re mad that Wall Street is doing exactly what it has always done. For real, are you this disconnected from reality?
Trump doesn’t care. Destroys the economy, weakens relationships with our former allies and other countries, and made America a laughing stock. Nearly all his decisions cause chaos and division. He does not even care when his decisions lead to innocent people being killed.
Insane that this narcissistic, incompetent person was elected a second time.
As for how he got elected, a good chunk of voters looked at the menu last year and decided nothing really appealed to them and told the vocal majority, “If you want turd soup, go ahead and order the turd soup”. Now everyone is eating turd soup.
Déjà vu all over again, thanks to the red state, low information voters who relied on the Fox News channel and Newsmax for their daily fix. They deserve what Trump’s chaos is going to do to them.
Imagine if the Dems had run an actual candidate following actual democratically run selection process. Then maybe we wouldn’t be in this position. But here we are.
Just stop. Most of us have an old pair of shoes we use to mow the lawn that is better suited to running the United States than Donald Trump. Those who claim it’s the Democrats fault? You wouldn’t have voted for the Democrat anyway. Did they run a terrible campaign? Of course they did, they’re the Democrats. They’re always badly organized.
How exactly could you forget how crummy Trump’s first term was in just four years? It was this bad all the time. He came in promising “infrastructure week” and “repeal and replace” Obamacare with a better, cheaper alternative. He packed the Supreme Court and judiciary with judges picked by billionaires then gave those same billionaires a big tax cut. How does anyone actually still think he cares one whit about the “common man”?
Democrats are guilty of not convicting Trump for treason in 2022, or thinking he contained any normal sense of decency that would cause him to sulk off into history to play some more golf in exchange for not being thrown in prison for the rest of his life. That’s about it. Heck, Mitch McConnell’s excuse for not giving him the conviction Trump so richly earned is that he thought Trump was finished, that there was no need to convict him and ban him from ever holding office ever again. How’d that work out?
On top of that, Trump was clearly not eligible for the election. If leading an armed mob to prevent Congress from completing their constitutional duty to certify your loss isn’t insurrection, after you lost 63 court cases, what isn’t? Maybe the Capitol Police should have just let those folks run free and commit some bipartisan violence. Then, maybe, legislators would have snapped out of it.
Except for Hawley. No way anyone was catching him. He might be a terrible legislator, but give him credit, guy has wheels.
Trump said he would lower prices “on day one”. Here is what is actually lower since he took office. The stock market, consumer sentiment, corn and soybean futures, job creation, US economic indicators, business investments. The MAGA crowd will blame this on the “Biden” economy that was handed to Trump. Under Biden the stock market regularly hit all time highs, consumer sentiment was strong, agriculture was booming because of strong exports, inflation was nearing 3%, job creation was strong, business investment was picking up as interest rates were falling, the economic indicators showed strong continued growth.
The MAGA crazies don’t believe facts. They don’t believe bona fide conservative economists like Prof. Mike Hicks, who has written all the same stuff repeatedly over the past month.
It really is a cult, or “1984” come to haunt us. Or both.
Trump and his cronies will not suffer from stocks tanking or a recession. They’ll probably profit from both. It’s those nearing retirement who’ll feel the pain when their nest eggs crack!
This x 10. As someone nearing retirement, I watched in shock 5 years ago as 45 totally mishandled COVID, and our retirement accounts tanked.
After 4 years of Biden we were in a strong place financially.
Today, with the Chainsaw Man threatening Social Security and 47 making a chaotic hash of the economy and markets, things aren’t looking so good.
Trump and our silent representatives in Congress are just doing a “MAGAnificent” job of detroying the Country to remake in King Donald’s image. Hopefull some great Democrats will be running against these idiots who continue to lick Trumps boots in hopes of keeping their phoney jobs as representatives. If a few would even stop to think about the country rather then themselves this nightmare would look different, but alas all they woory about is their bak accounnts.
Trump, Elon (Twitter) and Fox Lies conned all you peeps that voted for Trump. You blame Dems for not having a good candidate, but you elected DT for the nomination. Nikki Haley was the best choice, but the MAGA misogynists/racists wouldn’t vote for a woman, especially an Indian woman. .
Haley was by far the best candidate up for the job. I don’t believe there was any racism/sexism at play, the Maggots are just morons
That said, Democrats DID have poor candidates. The rank and file nominated a drooling old man, and when George Clooney told them they were going to get smoked in the General, they rolled out their DEI Queen