US stocks were sharply lower Friday as investors digested souring consumer sentiment and inflation data that showed an uptick in one of the Federal Reserve’s key gauges, underscoring the delicate state of the economy as businesses brace for President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The Dow tumbled 750 points, or 1.77%, on Friday. The broader S&P 500 fell 2.1% and the Nasdaq Composite slid 2.8%.
. . .
Wall Street was also grappling with Trump’s announcement on Wednesday of 25% tariffs on all cars shipped into the US, set to go into effect April 3. Trump also announced tariffs on car parts like engines and transmissions, set to take effect “no later than May 3,” according to the proclamation he signed.
Thanks Trump
So much winning.
Billionaires and corporations are absolutely winning, in the foreseeable future.
While yes, the stock market going down is the opposite of “corporations winning”
the pie is getting smaller but the oligarchs are getting bigger slices.
Looks like I made the right choice pulling most of my 401k out of stock/blended funds and into stable bonds.
Thanks trump.
The trump regime was designed to TANK the US economy so that stocks, businesses, and industries can be bought by billionaires at rock bottom prices.
All is going according to plan.
I have an acquaintance that works for an old money, very wealthy family from oil money. The kind that influences regional as well as national politics. He worked for them during the last major recession in the late ‘00s. He basically said that his employer and all their buddies were running all over the world buying everything they could “like it is a fire sale” during the recession.
So yeah. This is how we get more billionaires, more oligarchs, and more meta national corpo monopolies where one company controls multiple brand names.
The best we can do is to quit as soon as your company gets purchased. What they are after is the people. Specially the key role people.
Don’t document your process. Fix things without opening change requests. That way if you assemble things the quality will drop when you leave.
If you’re in a key role, just quit. Don’t go fucking around by deleting data. It’s better to make up data instead that seems real but is not. Never write an email that is personal or has anger in it because, even if you don’t send it, it gets saved. Same for your teams messages. You want to stay in the industry, but just quit if your company gets taken over by a billionaire.
Buy it with what? Billionaires don’t hold money, their valuation is all in stock value.
I think you’re giving them too much credit. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
We also believe the dynamic macro environment has contributed to a more cautious consumer
Am I getting this right? Is this double speak for “the government is fucking up so badly, people try to save some wealth for the inevitable fall of society”?
I look forward to mainstream media using real words with real meaning, again.
I think that is what the main point is. Brace for extremely hard times.
Personally, I am guessing that the American Dollar will end up like the Weimer Republic’s currencies.
I am removing my life savings from the bank and turning them into Euros. Everyone’s economy will dip, but I am pretty certain America will have a Greater Depression. Unlike the Great Depression or the Weimer Republic, the annihilation of government agencies and fiscal instruments is deliberate & total.
I’ve moved most of my savings to Gold since around 2010 partly because I was in the Finance Industry during the financial crash of 2008 and saw how the “fixes” done back then weren’t at all fixing the problems, just kicking the ball forward on the backs of people whose income mainly comes from work (hence the growth of inequality, slow down in social mobility and insane various bubbles including realestate that kept on getting inflated for the last decade) something which has been fueling the growth of the far right (people are feeling the pain, getting pissed of and lots of money has been put by very rich people into political entities and the newsmedia to spread the idea that it’s outsiders who are to blame for all this rather than very wealthy insiders plundering an economy which has ground down to a halt its growth, in collusion with local politicians).
I was also in the Tech Industry during the tech crash of 99, which probably made me even less trusting in the current system’s long term stability.
Gold is a pretty old fashioned way to try and retain some value on one’s savings, especially in countries where government management of the Economy and the local currency is pretty bad (in my own country of Portugal it used to be pretty popular to get it in the form of jewelry for that purpose, though not anymore, and it apparently still is in India and most of Asia including China).
(Basically, it’s the “oh shit” option for when the Economic situation gets very bad and people fear the value of state issued currencies themselves won’t hold)
I can tell you that even though Gold has been mostly just kept up with inflation for the last decade and a half (with an uptick when Russia invaded Ukrained), Donald Trump’s actions really made the value of Gold in most currencies (especially USD) take off like a rocket, or in other words, that the value of most currencies is falling hard compared to what up to 71 was treated worldwide as the reference “currency”.
IMHO, it’s a pretty fucked up sign, especially for the US Dollar (which has the extra nasty bit that it stops being the World’s Reserve Currency, all the benefits from it will unwind and if that happens fast - within a year or two - we might see shit like hyperinflation in the US).
PS: And if I may gloat a bit, I was living in Britain back when Brexit happened and did call it successfully and saved my savings by having most of them in Gold and Euros when Brexit crashed the British Pound by about 30% vs the Euro, something it never really recovered from. Maybe I was lucky but I remember that at the time and even before the Leave Referendum I felt that the Austerity in Britain was stretching the political environment in the country and that it wasn’t a safe place to hold my savings, even though back then all my income was in GBP.
I was in the Finance Industry during the financial crash of 2008
I was also in the Tech Industry during the tech crash of 99
I was living in Britain back when Brexit happened
Your life reads like the lyrics of Sympathy for the Devil.
We need to find where this motherfucker loves and stay away from there.
I’m Portugal now, so with the luck I have an American invasion of Europe will land here within the next couple of years.
Wake me up when it’s worse than 2022.
11 weeks ago, ‘2023’ was last year.
This isn’t a slump yet. If Dougie shuts off the power to three states, I hope he does it during a break between the “oh no unregulated drinking water had maaaaaaaassive e.coli in it” diarrhea outbreak right when the softwood tariffs have cratered the toilet paper supply the worst.
At that point in time, expect a stark realization of the state of things to cause some sadness to leak into the market too. I predict three northern states fighting for black market TP and shitting prolifically in the dark to really affect the market. But probably, still, not his numbers.
…what year do you think it is now?
Edit: i mistook their comma for a semicolon
Based on their comment, 2025.
I find it deeply funny that fascism is completely compatible with capitalism (it’s arguably its end-state), but they’re still tanking the economy because Trump doesn’t understand tariffs.
Fascism ultimately tanks any system because it prices loyalty above all else and you inevitably end up without any compitent people in charge.
Yeah, for sure, fascist regimes have a pretty short shelf-life in general because of cronyism and incompetence. I’m just saying there’s nothing inherent to fascism that should be tanking the economy right now in the way, say, a communist revolution would by causing capital flight. If he wasn’t pushing the worst, most unnecessary trade war in history, Trump could have a strong economy right now.
They understand tariffs. They want stock prices to tank so they can rake in on slashed prices. This is just more and more of the same wealth transfer in the past 45 years, just so in our faces that people don’t want to believe it’s happening.
I think that’s true for some of them, mostly the Wall Street folks who have enough diversified wealth to buy a lot of stock during the crash and wait it out. But I think the start-up folks, who’s companies have often never been profitable, and rely entirely on investors over-inflating their value to survive, are freaking the fuck out right now. And I think Trump is just legitimately dumb, doesn’t understand that a trade deficit doesn’t mean America is losing money, and genuinely doesn’t understand tariffs.
