Buckle up!
Wall Street is bracing for a wild ride Thursday after President Donald Trump unveiled a range of sweeping tariffs against some of America’s biggest trading partners.
Stocks sank in after-hours trading Wednesday after the commander-in-chief slapped a 10% baseline tariff on all exporters to the US — as well as steeper rates for nations he accuses of treating the country unfairly.
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China will be hit with a 34% rate, Japan faces a 24% tariff, and the European Union was targeted with a 20% levy.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1.7% in after-hours trading, the S&P 500 plunged more than 3% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq plummeted more than 4%.
“The amount of economic uncertainty as is measured is so massive now that markets feel like they are on a razor’s edge,” said one top New York hedge funder, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity.
Some investors, however, were relieved to finally get clarity on the long-promised tariffs and predicted the selloff won’t be as bad as many fear.
“This is not the worst-case scenario, which would have been a 20% global tariff across the board,” said Thierry Wizman, Macquarie Group’s global foreign exchange and rates strategist
“There will be some exceptions here, and the point is that we are making a discrimination between (different) countries that will form a basis for bilateral negotiations,” he told The Post.
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Dr. Sung Won Sohn, a distinguished economist and academic who teaches at Loyola Marymount University, told The Post that the markets “can handle bad news, but not uncertainty.”
“We’ve been experiencing uncertainty, and that’s one of the reasons the market has not been doing well,” he said.
The volatility on Wall Street has weighed heavily on US consumer confidence, which dropped to a four-year low last week as Americans cut back on discretionary spending amid fears of possible price spikes.
“I don’t expect the economy to go into a recession because of that, even though inflation would go up and economic growth will slow a bit,” Sohn said.
Sources have told The Post that top Wall Street CEOs have been in touch with the Trump administration in recent weeks to voice their concerns about the plans.
They include Blackrock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzmann, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, the people said.
