S&P 500 loses 5%, more than half Wednesday’s historic gain, as US-China trade tensions escalate
S&P 500 loses 5%, more than half Wednesday’s historic gain, as US-China trade tensions escalate

U.S. stocks are surrendering more than half of their historic gains from the day before as President Donald Trump’s trade war continues to confuse and threaten the economy, even if its temperature has cooled a bit.
The S&P 500 was down 5% in midday trading, slicing into Wednesday’s surge of 9.5% following Trump’s decision to pause many of his tariffs worldwide. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1,701 points, or 4.2%, as of 12:10 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 5.7% lower.
“Trump blinks,” UBS strategist Bhanu Baweja wrote in a report about the president’s decision on tariffs, “but the damage isn’t all undone.”
Trump has focused more on China, raising his tariffs on its products to well above 100%. Even if that were to get negotiated down to something like 50%, and even if only 10% tariffs remained on other countries, Baweja said the hit to the U.S. economy could still be large enough to hurt expected growth for upcoming U.S. corporate profits.
The losses for U.S. stocks accelerated Thursday after the White House clarified that Chinese imports will be tariffed at 145%, not the 125% rate that Trump had written about in his posting on Truth Social Wednesday, once his previous 20% fentanyl tariffs were included.
“Everything is still very volatile, because with Donald Trump, you don’t know what to expect,” said Francis Lun, chief executive of Geo Securities. “This is really big uncertainty in the market. The threat of recession has not faded.”
China, meanwhile, has reached out to other countries around the world in apparent hopes of forming a united front against Trump.
The stock price of Warner Brothers Discovery, the company behind “A Minecraft Movie,” dropped 13.5% for one of Wall Street’s sharpest losses after China said Thursday it will “appropriately reduce the number of imported U.S. films.” The Walt Disney Co.'s stock sank 7.6%