Why Are Markets Falling Again? Let Me Count The Ways
The market is seeing red again.
On the first trading day of the second quarter, the Dow slipped by more than 400 points, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq ended the day nearly three percent lower.
“We saw overnight China announced a tariff of up to 25 percent on about...130 U.S. products,” explained Matthew Battipaglia, Portfolio Manager at Washington Crossing Advisors.
China’s new tariffs hit a myriad of American goods, including fruits and pork, imports of which amount to around $3 billion.
The announcement comes merely weeks after President Trump slapped taxes on aluminum and steel imports from China and announced plans to tax $50 billion more worth of Chinese goods.
These trade war warning shots from two of the world’s largest economies worried investors Monday. They also added pressure to a market that was already heading downwards on negative news from the tech world.
Reports of Apple potentially ditching Intel and using its own chips for Mac computers drove Intel’s shares down by as much as nine percent. [Tesla, Facebook, and Amazon](https://cheddar.com/videos/facebooks-data-policies-are-like-cigarette-labels) also resumed their downward spirals to start the quarter.
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
Climate change doesn’t just mean more extreme weather – it also leads to billions of dollars in lost productivity, tourism, and stresses infrastructure.
