The Stockholm stock exchange opened with a fall of 8 percent and Frankfurt with 10 percent. By then, the Hong Kong stock exchange's Hang Seng index had already fallen by 12 percent.
The European stock exchanges are following the Asian stock exchanges' fall, notes Mattias Persson, chief economist at Swedbank.
It's always difficult to say how much it will fall, but when you compare with Asia and what is priced in for the USA, it's what you could expect – and it's blood red on the stock exchange. You can't hide anywhere globally, this is very alarming.
A small bright spot, he highlights, is that the krona is still holding stable against the dollar and euro
It's important for Sweden and Swedish inflation.
What everyone is waiting for today – and maybe tomorrow – is what countermeasures the USA will take against China, he highlights.
We live in a very uncertain world, nobody knows what will happen.
Neither is Annika Winsth, chief economist at Nordea, surprised by the stock exchange's fall. She describes Trump's tariffs as "directly harmful to world trade" and Trump's administration as "completely unpredictable".
Now this is affecting the whole world, as long as we don't know how these negotiations will go, there's a risk that it will continue to be dramatic, unfortunately in the wrong direction.
"Completely absurd"
If there are going to be negotiations, the next question is how long the tariff levels will persist, she highlights.
He wants his voters to think that he's doing good things anyway, he has promised them lower inflation and a better economy. This is a disaster for the American economy, higher prices and a worse economy – it's not what they voted for, says Annika Winsth and continues:
This is completely absurd, but I sit as an economist and think that it would be good if the American economy slows down strongly now so that it makes him change his mind. You would never say that about the world's leading economy in any other context, but that's where we are now: it's a really low level, she says.
