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.

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.