Name: ‘Man-made downturn’: Trump’s tariffs plunge stock market to historic drop
Uploaded: 2025-04-06T15:12:57.000Z
Duration: 9 min 59 s
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Breaking news again today after Donald Trump's damage to the US economy comes into fuller view.

The market's today once again taking a nosedive.

The Dow plunging 2,200 points, more than 5%.

Even those good jobs numbers that were released this morning could not shake the market's pessimism as China retaliated against Donald Trump's tariff regime.

The Chinese government imposed a 34% tax on all goods imported from the United States.

As for Donald Trump, he is for now tripling down.

Yesterday he said things were quote, going well.

Today he said on his site, Truth Social, that China had quote, played it wrong and panicked.

He added that the unemployment figures are a sign that his strategy is working, but those jobs numbers reflect the month before Donald Trump's so-called Liberation Day economic meltdown was put into motion.

It puts him at odds with the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, who said today that the tariffs would raise prices for consumers and will weaken the US economy.

It put him at odds with JP Morgan, who now predicts a 60% chance of a global recession this year.

Their report is titled, quote, there will be blood.

The bank says Trump's tariffs will cost consumers $700 billion this year alone.

It's a tax hike on a scale that LBJ imposed to pay for the Vietnam War.

It also puts Trump at odds with members of the Republican Party.

NBC News reports this, quote, after the GOP-led Senate delivered a rare rebuke to Donald Trump on Wednesday by voting to undo his tariffs on Canada.

Lawmakers in both chambers are weighing additional steps to rein him in.

Senators are eyeing other mechanisms to rescind Trump's existing tariffs while limiting his ability to impose new ones.

Trump is also right now at odds with the business community, which is preparing to pass on the cost of Trump's tariffs to the American consumers.

CNN reports this, quote, almost all consumer electronics, including smartphones and computer monitors, are likely to see price increases.

US toy companies are warning that prices could rise up to 50% because of tariffs on China and Vietnam.

Now, when it comes to cars, Washington Post reports this, quote, car dealers, who generally have a month or two worth of vehicles in stock, say they expect vehicle prices to jump significantly by summertime.

Just about every vehicle will eventually be affected.

Analysts expect an average markup of about $6,000 per car.

The American economy and American consumers paying the price for the gap between reality and Trump's tariff delusions is where we start today, once again with CNBC senior economics reporter, Steve Leisman.

Steve, where are we 24 hours after we first talked yesterday?

Well, we're quite a bit worse than we were.

I don't know if you remember, Nicole, we talked about that attempt yesterday of the market to rally and how it went nowhere.

I wonder if I could step back and try to give viewers an idea of how an investor in the stock market is trying to figure out what the heck's going on here.

We don't know which companies have been affected by the tariffs directly, which companies will be affected by companies that were affected by the tariffs directly, which companies will be affected by retaliatory tariffs, which companies, which is all companies, will be affected by the downturn potentially in the economy here and how much.

And of course, there's the consumer that has seen a decline in their sentiment about how they feel about the future and potentially a decline in their spending, which companies will be affected by that?

What I'm showing here is the fog that's come over people right now.

So what do you do when you don't know what's gonna happen?

Well, you either don't buy or you sell, and there is selling going on because of the opacity of what's happening with these tariffs.

You just read a wonderful, fabulous, horrible list of all the companies, all the ways that you can write right now that have been affected, but nobody knows how much further this goes.

We are now, Nicole, on a par with the great financial crisis and then the pandemic, and then in the third, in recent time, this downturn, this man-made downturn from the tariffs.

What precedents are there for manufactured economic crises?

I mean, COVID was a global pandemic that swept the world with a virus that was killing people, but what are the precedents?

I mean, what are forecasters looking to where the economic crisis is literally made up by one man?

Well, two men, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, perhaps in the 1930s, was one place.

Perhaps Arthur Burns and how he poorly responded to the inflation of the 1970s.

But it's hard to imagine, I don't know, a worse situation than this right now.

And I think one of the things, JPMorgan raised their recessions odds to 60%, as you know.

What was interesting about that commentary was how they said this change in business sentiment about the policy mix, which is kind of like saying, we thought Trump was on our side, and now it appears as if he ain't here.

There's a real feeling of leadership being MIA or AWOL or whatever military term you wanna use there, Nicole, which is the president's down in Florida, I believe he's golfing.

The Republicans in Congress are probably the one group of people that could stop this, but we don't see them acting with any sense of urgency here to put a stop to these tariffs.

And they appear, I don't know, content or otherwise, not taking any urgent action to stop this.

Remember, the Constitution gives Congress explicit power over tariffs.

Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating that another arena will have another sort of generation of people running around with pocket constitutions, right?

As we sort of tumble through this unknown, Steve Leisman, thank you very much for starting us off again.

Joining our conversation, executive editor and New York bureau chief for The Economist, Charlotte Howard is with us.

Also joining us, former Republican congressman, MSNBC political analyst, David Jelley is here, and Michael Linden's here.

He served as a senior advisor in the Office of Management and Budget under President Biden.

He's now campaign director of the group Families over Billionaires, which has to be filling a whole lot of steam behind a mission statement like that.

Tell me, Michael, what this week's sort of political events at the beginning of the week, the Cory Booker filibuster, the sweeping rebuke of Trump and Musk in Wisconsin, and the margins narrowing so dramatically in Florida, and then the sort of man-made economic calamity of the last 48 hours.

I mean, this week has been eye-opening, I think, for a lot of people.

On this very same day that Donald Trump imposes these massive tax hikes that will largely be paid by working people in this country, his allies in Congress are, right now, even as we speak, trying to pass a massive tax cut for mostly wealthy people and billionaires, as the name of my organization suggests.

And the mix here of asking wealthy, asking working people and everyday Americans to pay more at the grocery store and imposing this economic crisis, while saying to very wealthy people and giant corporations, we're gonna give you another tax break, it's just not what anybody in America was asking for, no matter who they voted for.

And I think you're starting to see that all over the country.

It's an unbelievably toxic mix of both bad economics and horrible politics.

Let's stick with the bad economics first, Charlotte.

Are you, is there anything that surprises you as the week has turned out to be the worst case scenario, economically speaking?

I think what's interesting is I've heard several people describe the market response as a panic.

It seems like a rational response to a completely irrational policy.

And I very much agree that this is a bet that seems very odd politically.

I mean, it's a bad reading of recent history, America's economy has been the envy of the world for the past few years.

It's a bad reading of basic economics, the goal of going after a completely balanced trade levels with every country in the world.

That's not actually a worthy goal in and of itself, right?

And so the bet that Donald Trump articulates is about raising revenue, about bringing manufacturing back.

If manufacturing were to come back to the United States, that payoff would be not at a large scale and certainly not in a timeframe that would benefit Donald Trump himself politically.

So there are ways in which both on the substance technically and on the politics, it is, I agree, just very strange.

But the market response is completely predictable given the policies that Trump announced.