President Donald Trump’s decision to forge ahead with sweeping tariffs plunged global markets into an unprecedented crisis created by a single man Monday.
The S&P 500 sank 3.5 percent at opening Monday, pushing it dangerously close to a bear market, or 20 percent below the record high it reached in February.
The latest drop was on top of the 10.5 percent the S&P already fell on Thursday and Friday, after Trump announced Wednesday afternoon that he was imposing sweeping import taxes on foreign products. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 is already facing a bear market after it closed 22 percent below its most recent high on Friday.
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As Trump has gone back and forth on his vow to enact sweeping tariffs, eventually landing on rates so aggressive that few believed they were possible, U.S. markets lost $9.5 trillion over the past 33 trading days, according to Bloomberg. Of that, $5 trillion was wiped out on Thursday and Friday alone.
It’s the second-fastest market plunge since 1945, meaning Trump has stoked truly historic market losses.
In several Asian markets, falling prices triggered circuit breakers, or temporary pauses intended to give investors time to cool off and avoid a market crash during moments of extreme volatility.
Japan’s exchange halted trading in Nikkei stock futures for 10 minutes, while trading was also briefly suspended in South Korea and Taiwan. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index suffered its worst single-day decline since 2008.
When markets opened in Europe, the FTSE 100 plunged 5.2 percent, and the DAX opened almost 10 percent down.
Those losses could be a warning sign that circuit breakers are also coming for the U.S. If the S&P falls between 7 and 20 percent within a single day, a 15-minute break is triggered. If it falls 20 percent or more, trading is suspended for the rest of the day.
As U.S. markets prepared to open, the phrase “Black Monday” was trending on the social media platform X. Users compared the situation to September 2008, when analysts carefully watched futures to try to predict the fallout from the devastating subprime mortgage crisis.
But in that case, the president was trying to stop the crash—not single-handedly causing it, they pointed out.
Trump, however, saw reason to celebrate.
“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 wrote on his Truth Social platform early Monday.
Trump’s import tariffs—which are paid by American companies, with the costs typically passed along to consumers—range from 10 percent to a staggering 49 percent, depending on the product’s country of origin.
When he announced the policy last Wednesday, he declared it “Liberation Day,” but by close Friday, the S&P was down 17 percent from its all-time high on Feb. 19, putting it just 3 percentage points away from a bear market, according to Reuters.
That same day, China said it would respond in kind with 34 percent tariffs on American products set to take effect this Wednesday, fueling fears of a global recession.
That prompted some of Trump’s own supporters to beg him to back off the looming trade war, but the president—who spent the weekend golfing on the taxpayer’s dime—has only doubled down.
On Sunday, he told reporters to “forget markets for a second” and said he wouldn’t cut the tariff rates unless countries negotiate to end trade deficits. (Despite calling them “reciprocal tariffs,” the rates were calculated based on manufacturing trade deficits with each country.)
“I’m willing to deal with China, but they have to solve their surplus. We have a tremendous deficit problem with China. They have a surplus of at least a trillion dollars a year,” he said aboard Air Force One. “We’re not going to lose a trillion dollars for the privilege of buying pencils from China.”
“Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” he added.
Later that night, he wrote in a Truth Social post, “We have massive Financial Deficits with China, the European Union, and many others. The only way this problem can be cured is with TARIFFS, which are now bringing Tens of Billions of Dollars into the U.S.A. They are already in effect and a beautiful thing to behold.”
Members of his Cabinet—including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—also tried to put a positive spin on the tariff chaos, saying there was “no reason” to anticipate a recession, Bloomberg reported.
In fact, analysts at JPMorgan now say there’s a 60 percent chance of global recession this year—up from a 40 percent chance the day the tariffs were announced, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Investors told Reuters it was probably “inevitable” that the market would have at least one up day this week, but that any rally was not likely to be sustainable.
“The bull market is dead,” Mark Malek, chief investment officer at Siebert Financial, told the news agency.
