Stock markets slide on Trump social media missives

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Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange after the US stockmarket fell (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange after the US stockmarket fell (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Stock markets across the western world felt the “chill winds” of Donald Trump’s latest trade salvos on Friday after the US President vowed to levy tariffs on imports from Europe and all Apple products made outside the US.

America’s S&P 500 index opened down 1.62 per cent as traders pared back bets on US stocks in response to the new developments in Trump’s long-running trade saga.

Shares in Apple opened 3.72 per cent lower, responding to the capricious President pledge to levy a 25 per cent import tax on all iPhones made outside the US.

Writing on Truth Social, Trump confirmed he had “informed Tim Cook of Apple” that he expects all iPhones sold in the US to be made in the US, “not India or any place else”.

“If that is not the case, a Tariff of 25 per cent must be paid by Apple to the US,” he added.

Minutes later, Trump posted another ‘truth’ pledging to levy a 50 per cent tariff on all the country’s imports from the European Union from the start of June.

Euopean stocks all fell sharply on the news. The pan-European STOXX 600 index fell just shy of two per cent after the trade salvo, pushing into to a weekly fall for the first time in over a month.

The blue-chip indexes in France and Germany fell too. Paris’ Cac and Frankfurt’s DAX dropped 1.65 per cent and 1.54 per cent respectively.

Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “Trump has made it clear that the EU is still out in the cold when it comes to trade negotiations and it’s sent a shiver through European stock markets.

“While the US administration has shown a willingness to broker deals with other nations around the world, the President’s chilly tone towards Europe has sparked fresh fears that punishing tariffs could become a reality for the bloc.”

The bearish sentiment spilled over into London-listed equities too. The FTSE 100 fell by as much as 1.35 per cent immediately after Trump published his social media posts, before paring back almost all of those losses to close down 0.24 per cent.