The Rachel Maddow Show
Needless economic pain from Trump not even worth it if his tariff gambit works: economist
Fri, 4 Apr 2025
Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor, discusses the likely consequences for average American consumers of Donald Trumps ill-considered tariffs, and explains why, even in Trump's best case scenario, his tariff gambit is not worth the pain he is imposing on the U.S. economy.
How did the tariffs affect the stock market?
Rachel has the night off, but she will be back tomorrow. I promise you that. And we're going to begin tonight with how the day began, and that is with the opening bell. As you know, every morning, Wall Street trading officially begins when someone rings the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in Lower Manhattan. We've all seen the images. It's quite important, quite symbolic.
The Stock Exchange does have this long tradition of letting a different company ring the opening bell each day. And in some ways, it is a way of celebrating some kind of milestone that the company has just hit or a company that may have been going public.
And today, because the news guides do have a sense of humor, the company with the distinct honor of actually ringing the opening bell today out of all days to officially start trading was the pro-Trump conservative media outlet Newsmax. Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy did the honors surrounded by several of President Trump's longtime associates. People, you know, people like Rudy Giuliani.
You see him there in the front. Trump's former labor secretary. Remember that guy, Alex Acosta? He was there as well. A little bit further back, though. And they all clapped and they cheered as it happens every morning. They rang tiny little bells as they officially kicked off. What we now know was an especially terrible day on Wall Street. Yeah, there's no sugarcoating it.
This was the worst day on Wall Street since the early days of the COVID pandemic. Traders and world leaders, and yes, ordinary Americans, people with jobs and 401ks, reacted to the tariffs that have been imposed by President Trump just yesterday by pretty much freaking out. It was a massive sell-off.
The Dow dropped nearly 1,700 points, its worst single session since June of 2020, nearly five years ago. The NASDAQ dropped nearly 6%, its biggest decline since, again, March of 2020. The S&P 500 dropped about 5%. And look, I should note that the New York Stock Exchange also has a tradition of letting another company ring the closing bell to mark the end of the trading day.
And today, that honor went to a company called Fiserv. The Fiserv CEO rang that closing bell, just happens to be Donald Trump's choice to run Social Security. So Trump's own allies, believe it or not, got to bookend this historic self-inflicted freefall of a day on Wall Street. They are now the face of this historic day. Their reaction to what Trump has just done went well beyond the U.S. markets.
Just take a listen to how some of our closest allies reacted over the course of the day as this news broke.
Clearly, there will be an economic impact from the decisions that the US has taken, both here and globally. But I want to be crystal clear.
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