US stock futures plummeted on Monday. This shows that the market turmoil that began last week will continue once it begins on Monday.
As of early Monday, the S&P 500 futures had fallen by about 3.3%. The high-tech NASDAQ futures also fell by about 3.5%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell by 1,000 points (3.2% or more) in volatile trading. Russell 2000 futures, which tracks small business stocks, were about 4.4% off.
Futures markets, the way traders move stocks when major exchanges close, are generally an implicit measure of how stocks behave when the market opens at 9:30am on weekdays.
President Donald Trump’s tariff disruption echoed around the world with key indicators in Europe and Asia, where markets fell into blood, causing circuit breakers in several places.
The major European equity index – Stoxx 600 – and the UK FTSE 100, the German DAX index, and the major French and Italian blues fell 5% around 5am.
Hong Kong led the losses in Asia, trading resumed after Friday’s holiday, with the Hangsen index surged to 13% (the largest one-day fall), and Japan’s Nikkei 225 index lost almost 8% in value.
After Nikkei 225 futures and Topix, trading was temporarily suspended in Japan, with Topix falling short to under 8%. Japan’s broader Topix index, as well as China’s CSI 300 index, recorded similar losses. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 extended its loss to 5.3%.
In South Korea, where the Kospi Index recorded a 5% drop, authorities announced they are ready to provide up to 100 trillion won ($68 billion) in emergency liquidity and other market stabilization measures.
Even Bitcoin prices, which showed signs of resisting a wide market slump on Friday, fell 5.6%.
This decline means another savage day is waiting for investors when it officially trades at 9:30am on Monday. The losses wiped out $6.6 trillion worth of the loss last week, along with two days of free falls, the worst 48-hour period in market history.
The major US benchmark for crude oil fell 3.7%, falling to just under $60 per barrel on Sunday. It bounced slightly back $60 a barrel early Monday morning at its lowest level since April 2021.
Over the weekend, Trump had little intention of retreating his proposal. His proposal would raise tariffs by 79% in countries like China.
“This is an economic revolution, we win, we’ll be tough,” Trump wrote on Saturday about the true society. “It’s not easy, but the end result is historic. We’ll make America great again!!!”
On Sunday evening he doubled again, “We have a massive fiscal deficit with China, the European Union and others. The only way we can fix this problem is that we have already brought billions of dollars into the US. You will find tariffs are very beautiful for the US!”
Asked about the market plunging late Sunday in Air Force 1, Trump said “taking drugs” can sometimes be “taking drugs” and that trading with China will not be involved unless the US trade deficit is addressed.
He also said he did not intentionally engineer the sale of the market. He said this was a claim that it contradicted the message Trump posted by Tiktok, and reposted it over the weekend.
In a release just before the futures trading begins Sunday, the White House released a short memo recognised the executive authorities for outlining Trump’s plans to end “a globalist economic destruction policy that shipped American jobs and industries abroad at the expense of American workers.”
The baseline 10% tariff came into effect on Saturday, with dozens of countries facing so-called mutual tariffs since Wednesday. China said Friday it would impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the US starting this Thursday, when US tariffs are expected to rise on Chinese products.
A Goldman Sachs analyst wrote that “the customs Pandora’s box was opened” over the weekend, adding that US actions, particularly against China, were “a lot higher than the previous basic incidents of economists, and most investors were hoping for it.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News in an interview Sunday morning that the White House is not considering extending the tariff launch date.
“There’s no postponement. They’re definitely going to stay for days and weeks,” Rutnick said.
“A military of millions of humans screw in small screws to make iPhones. That kind of thing comes to America and is automated,” he said. “American merchants – workers will fix it” robot.
Trump’s cabinet lined up behind him, but the overwhelming consensus between economists and well-known business executives was that tariffs were wrong. One surprising source of criticism was Elon Musk, a hit with Peter Navarro’s White House senior adviser on Saturday in trade and manufacturing. Navarro shot Musk in an interview on Sunday, saying he was “simply protecting his interests.”
However, it is not clear that the benefits of Musk differ particularly from those of many companies that rely on the modern global economic system and its cross-border supply chains. Tesla, alongside SpaceX, last month, filed a letter from the US trade representatives, ultimately warning the impact of tariffs and the threat of retaliatory things.
Trump refused to criticize Musk on Sunday. A reporter asked him that Musk is seeking zero tariffs between the US and Europe.
“Well, the problem is that Europe has made property with us,” Trump replied, riding in the Air Force. “You know, Europe has an incredible surplus with the US. Europe has been dealing with us. It’s been a little smaller, but they’ve treated us very badly.”
Before the futures that opened on Sunday evening, Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities Financial Group, cut Tesla’s stock price forecast by 43% and Apple’s price forecast by 23%.
“The economic pain caused by these tariffs is difficult to explain, essentially bringing the US high-tech industry back to ten years, with China distilling first,” he wrote.
He added that the currently constructed tariffs “will unleash the economic Armageddon and with its trajectory will halt the world of American technology.”
There were other signs of gravity in the situation. Stan Druckenmiller, one of the most successful Wall Street investors in history, has published only five posts about X to revise another poster summary of the interview he gave.
“I don’t support tariffs above 10%.
Large market downdrifting corresponds to the scale of what Trump proposed, rather than the tariff imposition established by most presidential administrations. Rather than simply taxing imports on the United States, Trump is trying to overturn the entire economic order based on global trade and cooperation, and is trying to move the US into a service-oriented economy and not resort to labour-intensive manufacturing.
The cost of returning to the type of export-oriented economy that Trump proposes is virtually incalculable, as it requires a relatively low standard of living indefinitely for the majority of Americans.
In the meantime, at least one Wall Street company has already predicted that unemployment rates will rise from 4.2% to 5.3%, with the economy poised to sign.
“The pinch from higher prices expected in the coming months could be more intense than the surge in inflation in the fathers as the average income rise is slowing,” a JPMorgan analyst wrote in a note to clients late Friday.
They said they expect a significant pullback in consumer spending (which drives 80% of the US economy) as a result of economic uncertainty.
Hedge fund investor Bill Ackman, avid supporter of Trump’s 2024 campaign, has posted a lengthy memo about X warnings about the outcomes for the economy if Trump fails to settle.
“The president has the opportunity to call timeouts on Monday and have time to carry out revisions to the unfair customs system,” he wrote. Or, “We are heading towards a self-induced economic core winter. We should start diving in. A cool head may win.”