March 11, 2025
Early Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1%, or more than 400 points, while the S&P 500 dropped 0.7%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite moved 0.4% lower in morning trades. At the end of the trading day, the markets ending another negative day with a loss of more than 478 points.
Just after the market open Tuesday, President Trump ordered an additional 25%-50% tariff on all steel and aluminum coming into the U.S. from Canada. The tariffs will go into effect tomorrow morning – March 12, 2025, according to President Trump’s post on Truth Social. That only means one thing. Reciprocal tariffs will be issued against the United States from Canada. There is no true winner here. Especially not investors or every day folks that go to work each day, work hard for their earnings and then come home and read the headlines, with Donald Trump in the news leading the way for markets to decline.
So who’s going to be a winner here? Truthfully not every day people, and unless you have the funds and the stomach to wade through the crazy markets, you will loose money. Is this the pain that Donald Trump wants us to feel? Is this what is right for America, especially right before a possible government shutdown on Friday. Hopefully the government shutdown can be averted.
There has been some hopeful days this month, but there is what is called the ‘fears index’, which just implies the volatility based on the options market and it has been getting higher each day, some of the highest levels experienced in months. This can be a signal as this gets excessive that the bottom is close by, but the warning is that the index can get a lot higher before it starts to come down.
At market close on Tuesday, there was still a sell-off as the DOW dropped another 478 points, a 1.14% drop, now at 41,433.48.
The S&P dropped .76% while the Nasdaq dropped .18%. It’s a little slower than for the previous days, but there still is a continuous drop that will effect or economy, kill jobs, a create higher costs. Trump believes that this will be temporary, but all indications from the people in-the-know say that this type of pain can last a long time. In just 50 days, Trump has hurt the economy as to just about push it off of a cliff and now in a free-fall. Trump believes that he has complete control of it. At the click of his fingers, he believes that the economy will be fixed, and that tariff prices will be stopped. There is nothing to explain it better than being in free-fall. For the last two weeks, especially since Trump originally initiated the 20% tariffs against Canada and Mexico, the markets have been so volatile that it’s getting hard to determine now how far it may go. The Dow slid nearly 500 points Tuesday after Trump announced and then walked back new tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, amid ongoing economic uncertainty — after closing 890 points down Monday. Canada has vowed to retaliate with tariffs of their own, and went as far as they may decide to cut electrical power off from 3 northern states if Trump continues his tariffs against Canada that receive hydro-electric power generated in Canada. As expected, Trump pulled back, now blaming his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for all the chaos that he’s causing with announced tariffs.
In a response to reciprocal tariffs from Canada, Trump says he will more than double the tariffs from 20% to 45%. The citizens of the United States are in for a shock. If this all plays out for the worst, Tuesday will be a preview doomsday event.
I will be following the stocks pretty intently tomorrow, and report it as things happen, so there should be several updates throughout the day tomorrow.