Friday, April 4, 2025, marked the second consecutive day major U.S. stock indexes fell sharply, a downtrend that follows President Donald Trump’s recent tariffs announcement and China’s Friday morning declaration to impose a 34% duty on U.S. goods in retaliation.
According to NBC News, significant market losses included Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, which fell by approximately 10%; agricultural equipment leader Caterpillar, down about 6%; and top AI chip manufacturer Nvidia, which declined by approximately 7%.
The S&P 500 index, which tracks 500 leading U.S. companies, dropped more than 4%, down more than 16% from its peak. The Russell 2000 index, which follows stocks of smaller U.S. companies, plummeted by 5.3%.
Global markets also experienced significant sell-offs, with European stocks declining 10% from recent highs and Asian markets facing sharp drops.
After the market had closed on Wednesday, April 2, 2025, Trump announced from the White House’s Rose Garden that he was imposing a 10% tariff on all imported goods and higher duties targeting specific countries, AFROTECH™ noted. The tariffs take effect at 12:01 a.m. EST on Saturday, April 5.
The tariffs resulted in significant declines in technology stocks on Thursday, April 3. Apple experienced its largest drop since 2020, falling by over 8%. Meta Platforms and Amazon each saw decreases of about 7%, and Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, saw declines of 1% and 3%, respectively.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index has dropped more than 5% — marking its worst trading session in over five years — and continued to slide by about 3.9% on Friday, NBC noted.
Some speculate that Trump is using the tariffs as a negotiating tactic to force businesses to relocate manufacturing and production back to the U.S., per the outlet. However, many business leaders and economists, including those on Wall Street, consider the president’s goal nearly impossible to achieve and predict significant economic turmoil instead.
“From the Dot.com bubble and burst to the financial crisis to Europe debt crisis to COVID-19 lows in March 2020… but never have we (or others that have covered the markets for 50 years+) seen a self-inflicted debacle of epic proportions like the Trump tariff slate over the last 36 hours,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note to clients on Friday, per Seeking Alpha.
He added, “The concept of taking the US back to the 1980s ‘manufacturing days’ with these tariffs is a bad science experiment that in the process will cause an economic Armageddon in our view and crush the tech trade, AI Revolution theme, and overall industry in the process.”
