Wall Street keeps shaking, and stocks sway between gains and losses as Trump’s trade war escalates
Wall Street keeps shaking because of tariffs. Stocks jumped to a big early gain, gave it back and then went up again as a volatile week for the market rolls on.
2025-03-12 20:29:24 - VI News Staff
The competing drivers of the market were an encouraging inflation update and the retaliation by other countries following President Donald Trump’s latest escalation in his trade war.
The S&P 500 was up 0.6% in afternoon trading after completely erasing an initial leap of 1.3% and then regaining some ground. The unsettled trading comes a day after the index briefly fell more than 10% below its all-time high set last month.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average also swung sharply, pinging between a gain of 287 points and a loss of 423. It was down 36 points, or 0.1%, as of 1:10 p.m. Eastern time, while the Nasdaq composite was 1.3% higher. The Nasdaq held up much better because of gains for Nvidia, Tesla and AI-related companies.
Dragging the market lower were U.S. companies that could be set to feel pain because of Trump’s trade war. Brown-Forman, the company behind Jack Daniel’s whiskey, tumbled 6.9%, and Harley-Davidson sank 5.6%.
U.S. bourbon and motorcycles are just two of the products the European Union is targeting with its own tariffs announced Wednesday. The moves were in response to Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum that kicked in earlier in the day.