News and business anchors on Thursday sounded alarms about the stock market plummeting in response to President Donald Trump announcing wide-ranging tariffs on other countries’ products — but Trump’s surrogates painted a very different picture.
“The market reaction after hours, I’ve never seen anything like it,” one business anchor said Wednesday evening as the stock futures dropped.
“Investors are clearly worried,” CNN anchor Kate Bolduan said.
“It’s a sell-off,” Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney said Thursday morning after the markets opened.
“Everybody sit back, take a deep breath,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said about stock sell-offs. “Don’t immediately retaliate. … That’s how we get escalation.”
Stocks plummeted Thursday morning, a day after Trump announced “reciprocal tariffs” on other countries. Shortly before 12:30 p.m., the Dow Jones Industrial Average had tumbled by 1,151 points, or 2.73%; the S&P 500 lost 197 points, or 3.48%; and the Nasdaq Composite declined by 794 points (4.51%).
Trump at a Wednesday ceremony held up a chart that showed a wide 10 to 50% range in the taxes on countries that include China, India, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, as well as the European Union. The chart lays out the tariffs and other trade costs that those countries, according to Trump, have placed on U.S. imports. The U.S. will now charge a tariff on each country that is equal to half of the number America calculated, in addition to existing tariffs. It is not clear what formula the U.S. is using to determine the rates.
“Wall Street knew that tariffs were going higher, but not this high, not this fast, not this broad,” one CNN reporter said.
But members of the Trump administration continued to defend the president’s moves, which some critics fear will lead to a recession and wipe away the Biden administration’s “soft landing” approach that had been gradually lowering inflation.
“The president is ensuring economic stability here in the United States of America,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a CNN interview. “This is a common sense policy.”
“This is a big change — I’m not gonna shy away from it,” Vice President JD Vance said in a “Fox & Friends” interview. “But we needed a big change.”
