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The S&P 500 fell 4% shortly after trading started Monday, officially putting the benchmark index into bear market territory. It later reversed some of those losses. But if the market closes the way it opened, Monday could be a truly historic day in the stock market — and not in a good way.
If the S&P were to close down more than 4% on Monday, it would be the third consecutive trading day it has posted declines of more than 4%. And that would be the first time the S&P 500 has suffered three consecutive drops of more than 4% in almost a century, since the 1929 stock market crash that marked the onset of the Great Depression.
President Donald Trump’s announcement last week of sweeping tariffs on almost every American trading partner sent stocks to their worst week since the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Stocks had their worst day in five years on Thursday, and then did so again on Friday.
The bleeding continued Monday. Shortly after 10am, the S&P 500 was down 2.3%, paring losses of 4% that saw it join the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite in in a bear market (a fall of 20% or more from a recent peak). The Nasdaq was off 1.6% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average Futures fell 2.7%.
Stocks plunged overseas, with Hong Kong’s main market index plunging 13% in its worst day since Asia’s 1997 financial crisis. Stocks also fell sharply in Europe.
Trump, who has struck a defiant tone in reaction to the extended market selloff, said again late Sunday that his trade policies will bring needed systemic change to the U.S. economy.
“What’s going to happen to the markets, I can’t tell you,” the president told reporters on Air Force One on his way back to Washington from a weekend in Florida. “I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
Bill Ackman had a warning for Trump on Sunday: Hit pause on the trade war on risk crashing the economy.
“The country is 100% behind the president on fixing a global system of tariffs that has disadvantaged the country,” Ackman, the billionaire CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, said in a lengthy post Sunday on X. “But, business is a confidence game and confidence depends on trust.”
“By placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital,” Ackman went on. “The president has an opportunity to call a 90-day time out, negotiate and resolve unfair asymmetric tariff deals, and induce trillions of dollars of new investment in our country.”