US stocks were battered by a sell-off Friday after China retaliated against the United States for President Donald Trump’s tariffs in a tit-for-tat that escalates a global trade war.
The Dow plunged by 1,950 points Friday afternoon, or 4.82%, pulling back slightly after being down more than 2,000 points. The broader S&P 500 was 5.4% lower. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was 5.36% lower and on track to close in a bear market — down more than 20% from its record high in December.
Don’t care about the grand casino lines and neither should you, unless you look at the fancy lines you personally invested in.
The bigger coming bomb will be when those tariffs actually catch up with domestic consumption (going down hard because no one has money anymore to pay for all of this), leading to mass layoffs, leading to even more reduction in consumption because even less people have money, leading to more layoffs, leading to… Mass austerity that will eat up the savings reached by dismantling the government, because of the brutal tax losses for the remnants of said government.
Americans should be angry because most American retirement plans are heavily rooted in the stock market these days.
America’s right has been pretty relentlessly trying to get people out of pensions and into 401Ks for decades, and now that same party is blowing up the economy yet again.
Not just pensions. They’ve also been trying to get rid of Social Security in favor of private retirement accounts invested in the stock market for decades now.
It isn’t just our retirement plans, it’s also our jobs that are tied to the market. When stock prices drop, then companies start tightening their belts, which usually involves layoffs.
As I understand that’s also not showing the results they’d hoped to see based on calculations they were and are pulling directly out their asses.