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Wall Street’s Tariff Hunger Games

There are multiple contradictory theories making the rounds among smart investors to rationalize Trump’s trade war: forcing other nations to play fair, raising revenue to offset tax cuts, crashing the economy to refinance the debt. The one point of agreement: C.E.O.s are nervous, very nervous.

donald trump
The effect of the tariffs, at whatever level they shake out, will begin to show up later this year in corporate earnings, where it really matters. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
April 6, 2025

The one word I heard over and over again on Wall Street this past week was “shitshow,” and with good reason. U.S. equity markets lost some $7 trillion in value on Thursday and Friday after Donald Trump announced tariffs of anywhere between 10 percent and 54 percent on virtually every country in the world, many without rhyme or reason. In a cheery note, Bruce Kasman, the chief economist at JPMorgan Chase, increased the probability of a recession this year to 60 percent, up from 40 percent. “This big beautiful economy that actually was rolling pretty good with jobs and inflation coming down. [This] feels more like the Game of Thrones red wedding,” the longtime investment banker and Biden ally Robert Wolf said on Fox News, referring to a scene in which all the guests were brutally murdered. “I mean, it’s not going well.”