President Donald Trump’s intensifying trade war on Thursday drove financial markets into their steepest one-day declines since 2020 as investors, companies and ordinary Americans fretted about rising costs from an onslaught of new tariffs.
U.S. stocks closed down sharply, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq falling close to 6 percent for the day and about 17 percent from its mid-February peak, with Apple, Google and Nvidia all posting big losses. The S&P 500 notched its biggest one-day drop since summer 2020 — in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic — closing down 4.8 percent, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 4 percent. Major indexes in Asia and Europe also took a fall, though some recovered their losses during their trading day.
The wave of new import taxes, which are expected to cost U.S. consumers and businesses hundreds of billions of dollars this year, threatens to radically alter the economic outlook. Analysts at J.P. Morgan described the tariffs as the largest U.S. tax hike since 1968, and economists on Wall Street and beyond began warning that a downturn is becoming much more likely this year.
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