Economy

President Trump’s global tariffs have sent stock markets worldwide into a tailspin, and the S&P 500 on Monday briefly entered bear market territory for the first time since 2022.Mr. Trump has seemed unmoved by the decline. He signaled on Monday that he had no plans to back off on tariffs, insisting that they would bring in “billions of dollars” in revenue and that other countries had been “abusing” the United States with their trade policies.Here is what to know about a bear market.What is a bear market?A bear market is a Wall Street term for a sustained market downturn, when a stock index closes 20 percent from its last peak.The 20 percent threshold signals investor pessimism about the future of the economy.Are we in a bear market now?The S&P 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, opened lower on Monday. The index was already down 17.4 percent from its last high, on Feb. 19, and if it closes Monday’s trading with a loss of at least 3.1 percent, that would tip it into a bear market. More

The news seemed big: That the Trump administration was considering a 90-day pause to his expansive tariffs.The problem was, it wasn’t true.But in a sign of the precarious nature of the markets right now, an unsubstantiated online report spiked shares sharply, albeit briefly, and continued to climb after CNBC and Reuters relayed the claim. The White House quickly responded saying that the report was “FAKE NEWS,” and CNBC and Reuters issued statements correcting the record.Stocks fell back down after those corrections. Still, the fallout continued to reverberate on Monday, and became a cautionary tale of the risk of using information drawn from the fast-moving echo chamber of social media without first confirming the news independently.Asked earlier in the day about the possibility of a pause on imposing the expansive tariffs announced by President Trump last week, Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said on Fox News: “I think the president is going to decide what the president is going to decide.”Walter Bloomberg, an influential X account that is unaffiliated with Bloomberg News, amplified a post on social media claiming Mr. Hassett had said Mr. Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs.Minutes after the Walter Bloomberg account’s post, Carl Quintanilla, a CNBC anchor, read a headline on air echoing the reports about Hassett. “I think we can go with this headline,” Mr. Quintanilla said, without attributing the news. A person with knowledge of the editorial process at the network said Mr. Quintanilla had read a CNBC headline that was circulated prematurely by mistake.After that, Reuters flashed a headline, citing CNBC. The Walter Bloomberg account later deleted the post. In a direct message on X, the account said to The New York Times that the post had originated minutes earlier from another X account. “Given the market movement — plus 4.5 percent — I deemed the headline reliable and posted it at 10:13,” the Walter Bloomberg account said in the direct message. “A few minutes later, Reuters picked up the story, citing CNBC.”CNBC issued a correction soon after mentioning the potential pause, saying its “aired unconfirmed information in a banner,” adding that its reporters “quickly made a correction on air.” Reuters also issued a correction, saying its report relied on a headline from CNBC. “Reuters has withdrawn the incorrect report and regrets its error,” it said in a statement. More

President Trump’s wave of tariffs threatens to bring both short-term economic pain, including lower growth, and long-term damage to America’s standing and trade relationships around the world, the chief executive of Wall Street’s biggest bank warned on Monday.“The recent tariffs will likely increase inflation and are causing many to consider a greater probability of a recession,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.The warning by Mr. Dimon, one of Wall Street’s most influential leaders, echoes the growing anxiety among corporate chiefs about how the tariffs will play out. Even those who had initially professed support for Mr. Trump’s trade plans are becoming increasingly worried about the consequences.Even before Mr. Trump’s tariff announcement last week, the U.S. economy had been showing signs of strain after years of healthy performance, Mr. Dimon wrote. Inflation was already a worry, he said, pointing to a yawning fiscal deficit and the need for more infrastructure spending. And stock valuations remain well above historical averages, even after the recent market sell-off.The potential consequences of the trade fight could make things worse, the letter said. Those include other countries’ efforts to fight back — as China has done by imposing 34 percent counterlevies — and a possible erosion of confidence among consumers and investors. Mr. Dimon also warned about the weakening of the American dollar’s role as the global reserve currency.“If America, for whatever reason, becomes a less attractive investment destination, the U.S. dollar and the economy could suffer if foreigners sold their U.S. assets,” he wrote.JPMorgan’s own economists have increasingly been saying a recession is more likely this year, though Mr. Dimon did not personally take a position on those odds in his shareholder letter.While he asserted that JPMorgan itself was strong enough to withstand the shocks that the levies posed — its traders have profited from previous whipsaws in the markets — the global economy may not be so fortunate. “It is not particularly good for the capital markets,” Mr. Dimon wrote of the tariff-linked volatility.For now, Mr. Dimon wrote, he is hoping for a speedy resolution to the trade battles. “The quicker this issue is resolved, the better, because some of the negative effects increase cumulatively over time and would be hard to reverse,” he wrote.The longer-term worry, Mr. Dimon said, is that Mr. Trump’s fight could shred decades-old alliances that cemented the United States’ primacy in the global order. The JPMorgan chief wrote that he was worried that America’s trading partners might seek out deals with the likes of China, Iran or Russia in response to the tariffs.“America First is fine,” Mr. Dimon wrote, referring to Mr. Trump’s description of his policies, “as long as it doesn’t end up being America alone.” More

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said many business leaders already believe the U.S. economy is slowing down.
The asset management executive also sees the likelihood for the Trump administration’s trade policies to cause upward pressure on prices.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink speaks at the Economic Club of New York on April 07, 2025, in New York City. 
Spencer Platt | Getty Images

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said Monday that many business leaders believe the United States economy is already in a significant downturn.
“Most CEOs I talk to would say we are probably in a recession right now,” Fink said at an event for the Economic Club of New York.

“One CEO specifically said the airline industry is a proverbial bird in a coal mine — canary in the coal mine — and I was told that the canary is sick already,” Fink added.
The asset management executive also said that he thinks the tariff policies of President Donald Trump could put upward pressure on inflation and make it difficult for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, as the central bank often does during recessions.
“This notion that the Federal Reserve is going to ease four times this year, I see zero chance of that. I’m much more worried that we could have elevated inflation that’s going to bring rates up much higher than they are today,” Fink said.
Pricing in the fed funds futures market currently suggests that traders expect the central bank to lower its benchmark interest rate by at least 1 percentage point by the end of the year, according to the CME FedWatch tool, which could be four cuts of 0.25 percentage point.
BlackRock as a firm held more than $11 trillion in assets as of the end of 2024, spread across public and private investments.

Fink’s comments were broadcast on Bloomberg Television.
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Billionaire investor Bill Ackman said that America was heading toward a self-inflicted “economic nuclear winter” as a result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy rollout.
“Business is a confidence game. The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe,” said the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management.

Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, speaks during an interview for an episode of “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations,” in New York on Nov. 28, 2023.
Jeenah Moon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman said that America was heading toward a self-inflicted “economic nuclear winter” as a result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy rollout.
“By placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner,” Ackman, who had endorsed Trump during the election, wrote on social media platform X.

Trump’s latest tariffs, signed into effect Wednesday, set a 10% baseline levy on all imports, hitting more than 180 countries and hammering global markets.
China faces the highest tariffs, with the Trump administration having announced 54% in duties since February. Beijing has retaliated with 34% tariffs on all goods imported from the U.S.
U.S. equities capped off a vicious week for investors last Friday, with the S&P 500 down 9.08%, according to data from FactSet, as Trump’s moves stoke fears of a global economic slowdown. JPMorgan last week lifted the odds for a U.S. and global recession to 60% by the end of the year, up from 40% previously.
“Business is a confidence game. The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe,” Ackman said.
“The consequences for our country and the millions of our citizens who have supported the president — in particular low-income consumers who are already under a huge amount of economic stress — are going to be severely negative. This is not what we voted for,” the hedge fund manager said.

Trump has the opportunity to call for a timeout for any negotiations to resolve any “unfair” tariff deals.
“Alternatively, we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down,” he said.
In a separate tweet, Ackman also took potshots at U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “He profits when our economy implodes. It’s a bad idea to pick a Secretary of Commerce whose firm is levered long fixed income,” Ackman said, adding that it is an “irreconcilable conflict of interest.”
On Sunday, Lutnick told CBS that the Trump administration will remain steadfast in its reciprocal tariffs against key trading partners even in the face of a global stock rout.
The U.S. Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Correction: China faces the highest tariffs, with the Trump administration having announced 54% in duties since February. An earlier version misstated the month. More

U.S. oil prices fell sharply, briefly dipping below $60 a barrel on Sunday — their lowest level in almost four years — as the economic fallout from President Trump’s latest round of tariffs reverberated around the world.The price of crude oil is down more than 15 percent since last Wednesday, just before Mr. Trump revealed his plans to impose stiff new tariffs on imports from most countries. That prices have fallen so far so quickly reflects deepening concern that high tariffs could slow economic growth and perhaps even cause recessions in the United States and the countries it trades with.The cost of U.S. benchmark crude continued to fall on Monday, down more than 2 percent. Cheaper oil is generally good for consumers and businesses that use gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. In fact, Mr. Trump and his aides have pushed for lower energy prices to curb inflation.But if prices remain around these levels or fall further, U.S. oil and gas companies are likely to slow drilling, cut spending and lay off workers. That would be especially painful to oil-rich states like Texas and New Mexico.Another big reason that oil prices have weakened is that the OPEC cartel and its allies announced last week that they would accelerate plans to increase production. That will increase supply of oil at a time when many analysts expect demand to weaken.U.S. energy companies are also getting squeezed by higher costs for essential materials like steel tubing, which is subject to a 25 percent tariff Mr. Trump announced in February.Smaller oil companies — a key constituency for Mr. Trump — are likely to be among the first to slow down, as they tend to be more nimble and have fewer financial resources. Natural gas prices have been more resilient, providing some cushion for producers.Last week, the share price of an exchange-traded fund composed of U.S. oil and gas stocks fell by 20 percent in the two days after Mr. Trump’s tariff announcement. More

Virtually everyone in the cryptocurrency world celebrated the second election of President Trump, an enthusiastic booster of the industry who promised to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.”But now the man nicknamed “the first Bitcoin president” is presiding over a Bitcoin crash.Since Mr. Trump announced his global tariffs last week, the price of Bitcoin has plunged 10 percent, dropping below $78,000 on Sunday night. In January, Bitcoin reached a record price of nearly $110,000 on the day that Mr. Trump was inaugurated.The rapid drop shows that Bitcoin, often pitched as a stable long-term source of value, is still subject to the gyrations of the broader market that has cratered since Mr. Trump announced broad import taxes last week. Many investors treat Bitcoin just like any other tech stock, a risky investment that it makes sense to sell in difficult times.Ever since he won a second term, Mr. Trump has largely made good on his promises to help the crypto industry. He has appointed regulators who support crypto and signed an executive order directing the creation of a government stockpile of Bitcoin.At the same time, Mr. Trump has also broadened his personal investments in the crypto world, marketing a so-called memecoin to his supporters.But the impact of his tariffs on the crypto market has led to some disgruntlement.“Crypto is weird, but it’s mostly correlated to optimism & risk appetite,” Haseeb Quresehi, a venture investor who specializes in crypto, wrote on social media on Sunday. “That optimism is crumbling under Trump’s silence.” More

Free trade has been so beneficial to so many countries that the world may find a way to live without its biggest player.President Trump’s self-proclaimed “liberation day,” in which he announced across-the-board tariffs on the United States’ trading partners, carries an echo of another moment when an advanced Western economy threw up walls around itself.Like Brexit, Britain’s fateful vote nearly nine years ago to leave the European Union, Mr. Trump’s tariffs struck a hammer blow at the established order. Pulling the United States out of the global economy is not unlike Britain withdrawing from a Europe-wide trading bloc, and in the view of Brexiteers, a comparable act of liberation.The shock of Mr. Trump’s move is reverberating even more widely, given the larger size of the American economy and its place at the fulcrum of global commerce. Yet as with Brexit, its ultimate impact is unsettled: Mr. Trump could yet reverse himself, chastened by plummeting markets or mollified by one-off deals.More important, economists say, the rise of free trade may be irreversible, its benefits so powerful that the rest of the world finds a way to keep the system going, even without its central player. For all of the setbacks to trade liberalization, and the grievances expressed in Mr. Trump’s actions, the barriers have kept falling.The European Union, optimists point out, did not unravel after Britain’s departure. These days, the political talk in London is about ways in which Britain can draw closer to its European neighbors. Still, that sense of possibility has come only after years of turbulence. Economists expect similar chaos to buffet the global trading system as a result of Mr. Trump’s theatrical exit.“It will not be the end of free trade, but it is certainly a retreat from unfettered free trade, which is the way the world seemed to be going,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University. “Logically, this would be a time when the rest of the world bands together to promote free trade among themselves,” he said. “The reality is, it’s going to be every country for itself.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More