The market rally following President Donald Trump’s reelection is effectively over. The S&P 500 has lost nearly all of its post-election gains as Wall Street responds to Trump’s decision to move forward with aggressive tariffs.
Global markets tumbled Tuesday following Trump’s enactment of a 25% tax on Mexican and Canadian imports in addition to a 10% levy on China, with the S&P 500 closing at 5,778.15 and trading as low as 5,732.59. The index closed at 5,782.76 on Nov. 5’s election day.
The S&P is trading up Wednesday, hovering around 5,815.90 as of midafternoon, following an announcement from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick late Tuesday that the U.S. could announce a trade deal with Mexico and Canada as early as Wednesday.
Trump’s tariffs announcement rattled investors , who were initially optimistic they would be used as a negotiation tactic—copycatting from Trump’s first administration playbook—rather than a new trade policy. Analysts now worry the tariffs could disrupt decades of free trade in North America, as well as jostle industry supply chains and spike inflation, raising consumer prices.
“The trouble with tariffs, to be succinct, is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worsen inequality, diminish productivity and increase global tensions,” JPMorgan chief global strategist David Kelly said on Tuesday, per Bloomberg . “Other than that, they’re fine.”
Trump said Tuesday in a joint session of Congress his tariffs would cause few economic disruptions. “There’ll be a little disturbance,” he said. “But we’re okay with that. It won’t be much.”
Economic canaries in the coal mine
Tuesday’s market slump was concerning to analysts not just because of Wall Street’s reaction to tariffs, but because it also featured disruptions to several other sensitive sectors beyond the S&P 500.
“Not only is the Trump bump gone, but we're starting to see…a dog perking up its ears,” Chris Grisanti, chief market strategist at MAI Capital Management, told Fortune . “It’s not proving anything's out there. It’s just that we're a little bit more on the alert now because we're starting to see things that are troublesome in the market.”
The big banks, including Bank of America and Morgan Stanley , took a hit Tuesday and remained sluggish on Wednesday. Oil prices also fell on news of tariffs, as well as a U.S. pause of military aid to Ukraine, which could signal the end of Russian oil sanctions. But airline stocks also tumbled, with Boeing’s share price plummeting 7%, which concerned analysts because oil and airline prices are usually inversely related as airlines benefit from cheaper fuel costs.
Slowing job growth has added onto the economic uncertainty, with APD reporting 77,000 new private-sector jobs in February, far below the 186,000 new jobs in January and the estimates of 140,000 for last month. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its February jobs report Friday.
While few economists predict a recession, Grisanti believes investors may begin to turn their priorities away from hoping for lower interest rates—which would reinvigorate the economy but would require its growth to have slowed significantly—and toward economic strength, indicated through optimistic earnings and jobs reports. There’s also a chance the market’s tumultuous couple weeks could be a result not of Trump’s policy changes, but rather an economic cycle that is in a natural trough.
“Trump might be doing really bad things to be coming with tariffs, or Trump might just have had the terrible luck of having been elected president at the top of the business cycle,” Grisanti said. “And even if he didn't do any tariffs, the economy may just be exhausted, as it sometimes gets.”
