The stock market fell today because of President Donald Trump‘s tariffs, said Art Cashin, managing director at UBS Financial Services.
“Early in the morning, the Bank of England announced they were going to leave rates steady,” Cashin said Thursday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” “That pulled the legs out of the European markets. They dropped sharply. That helped pull us down, and then we had an absolute stew of headlines throughout the day.”
Those headlines included the Fed fallout, concerns over possible trade wars and tech stocks tumbling after the recent Facebook data scandal, causing the major indexes to plunge.
“All of those things came up,” but it was Trump’s new tariffs that caused the biggest pain in the market, Cashin said. Earlier in the day, the Trump administration unveiled new tariffs, a retaliatory measure intended to punish China for alleged intellectual property theft.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 724.42 points, closing at 23,957.89 — a 2.9 percent decline. The S&P 500 was also down 2.5 percent to 2,643.69. And the Nasdaq Composite declined 2.3 percent to close at 7,166.68.
Cashin said tech companies would most likely allow the market to rebound “if they can resurrect themselves,” he said. “They are thought to some degree to be victims in a tariff war. China might go out of its way to affect those industries.”
