If you were on X yesterday, chances are you saw the platform go dark — Elon Musk said his platform was hit by a “massive cyberattack” — or you saw the word recession trending in your feed.
At noon Eastern, midway through regular trading hours, “recession” peaked in popularity on X, with over 47,000 users citing the term. And for good reason. All three major U.S. stock indexes — Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 — suffered their worst falls since Election Day.
This was not a huge surprise. On a Fox Sunday morning show, Trump gave an eyebrow-raising reply when Maria Bartiromo asked if he thought the economy was headed for a recession.
“I hate to predict things like that,” he said. “There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing.”
Stock indexes reflect investor sentiment about how companies will perform in the future and the broader economy. Yesterday’s sharp losses led big banks like JP Morgan Chase to revise their outlooks on the year ahead — raising the risk of a potential recession to 40%.
The last U.S. recession was four years ago, triggered by pandemic-induced shutdowns that stalled every sector of the economy. Like then, companies today cannot plan or predict their future earnings — due to dramatic policy shifts promised by Trump — making it harder for investors to bet on them. The result? What we saw yesterday: A major selloff.
Wall Street’s worst day in months comes on the heels of a political ping pong match — a tariff war started by Trump — with America’s three largest trading partners: Canada, Mexico, and China.
CEOs are frustrated. They cannot plan for the future and make large orders without knowing where trade policy stands. Many also fear Trump’s deportation plans — promised to be “the largest in U.S. history” — will disrupt their reliance on low-cost labor.
Industry leaders, however, are shy to speak out against him. Trump is no fan of dissent. One brave Chevron executive, Mike Wirth, did take the stage at America’s largest energy conference in Houston yesterday to send a message: “Swinging from one extreme to another is not the right policy.”
Weird defined the summer campaign cycle. Now, uncertainty is the word to watch—as it is used to characterize our new era: life under Trump 2.0. Uncertainty over tariffs, immigration policy, and recession fears drove investors to pull their money out of the market yesterday — leading to the dramatic declines of the three indexes.
The question is: Will Trump heed the woes of Wall Street, as he has done in the past, or ignore their calls for calamity in an act of defiance?
Ashley Elizabeth Miller 
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