It comes a day after the Trump administration said that talks are ongoing with 50 countries.
The three major U.S. stock markets opened lower on Monday morning but saw gains later in the morning amid uncertainty over recent tariff announcements.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average led the way with an initial 1,600-point drop but entered positive territory at around 10 a.m. local time.
But as of 10:45 a.m., the Dow was down 700 points, while the Nasdaq Composite shed 0.6 percent and the S&P 500 dropped about 1 percent.
Elsewhere, stocks in Hong Kong plunged 13.2 percent for their worst day since 1997. A barrel of benchmark U.S. crude oil briefly dropped below $60 for the first time since 2021, and bitcoin sank below $78,000, down from its record above $100,000 set in January, after holding steadier than other markets last week.
In an announcement on April 2, President Donald Trump said he would impose a 10 percent baseline U.S. tariff on nearly every country, which he said would bring manufacturing back into the United States and bolster national security around supply chains. Countries that have higher trade surpluses with the United States received higher rates than the 10 percent baseline.
In a post on Truth Social on Monday, Trump said countries had been “taking advantage of the Good OL’ USA” on international trade.
“Our past ‘leaders’ are to blame for allowing this, and so much else, to happen to our Country,” he wrote. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Trump then criticized the Chinese regime after it announced it would be increasing its own tariffs, pointing out it didn’t acknowledge his “warning for abusing countries not to retaliate.” In last week’s announcement, the White House was critical of longstanding “non-market economies like China” that have harmed “America’s middle class and small towns” for decades.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One late Sunday, Trump said he didn’t want global markets to fall, but also that he wasn’t concerned about the massive sell-off either, adding that, “sometimes, you have to take medicine to fix something.”
“I spoke to a lot of leaders, European, Asian, from all over the world,” Trump said. “They’re dying to make a deal. And I said, we’re not going to have deficits with your country. We’re not going to do that, because to me, a deficit is a loss. We’re going to have surpluses or, at worst, going to be breaking even.”
