U.S. stock futures tumbled Sunday evening, extending last week’s historic selloff as the White House stood firm on its sweeping new tariff policy despite mounting market pressure.
What Happened: Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell 1,257 points, or 3.26%, to 37,273, while S&P 500 futures dropped 190.50 points, or 3.73%, to 4,919.75. Nasdaq-100 futures experienced the steepest decline, plummeting 807.50 points, or 4.60%, to 16,731.50. The U.S. Dollar Index also weakened, falling 0.23% to 102.79.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 plunged 2,509.53 points, or 7.43%, to 31,271.05 on Monday morning at 9:53 a.m. local time.
The weekend decline follows the market’s worst performance since March 2020. The S&P 500 plunged 6% Friday, pushing its two-day losses past 10%, while the Nasdaq entered bear market territory after falling 22% from its record high.
Trump said on Sunday, “I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” adding that foreign governments would have to pay “a lot of money” to lift the tariffs, according to Reuters, showing little concern over $6 trillion in U.S. market losses.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking on the Tucker Carlson Podcast Friday, attributed the selloff to a correction in tech valuations rather than administration policy, calling it “more a MAG Seven problem than a MAGA one,” referring to market leaders Microsoft Corp. MSFT, Apple Inc. AAPL, NVIDIA Corp. NVDA, Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG, Amazon Inc. AMZN, Meta Platforms Inc. META, and Tesla Inc. TSLA.
“This isn’t about tariffs, it’s about a dose of reality in the AI space,” Bessent claimed, suggesting China’s DeepSeek AI breakthrough triggered the reassessment of U.S. tech valuations.
Why It Matters: Bessent defended the tariff strategy as “transformational for the American economy,” citing MIT research that previous 20% tariffs on China only increased U.S. prices by 0.7%. He framed the policy as temporary: “First, we collect. Then, we build. Then, the tariffs drop—but revenue from taxes and jobs goes up.”
The semiconductor sector has been particularly hard hit, with the iShares Semiconductor Index SOXX falling 17% last week—its worst weekly performance since the 2001 dot-com crash.
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