Here’s what bright minds on Wall Street are saying about Trump’s tariff-fueled market meltdown

• President Donald Trump’s global trade war has sent markets into a frenzy this week.

• Trump’s latest and most aggressive tariffs brought chaos to the bond market on Wednesday.

• Investors and CEOs have been weighing in on Trump’s levies.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs came into effect on Wednesday, as chaos continued to plague global financial markets.

While Trump’s latest round of levies has seen wild volatility in the stock market, attention Wednesday turned to bonds, with US Treasury yields spiking and prices falling amid retaliatory measures announced by China and the EU.

Here’s what Wall Street’s top minds have been saying about tariffs and the economy this week.

The US is likely already mired in a downturn — and stocks could plummet another 20% before they find a bottom, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said.

Fink, who spoke at an event at the Economic Club of New York on Monday, added that he was concerned there were more inflationary pressures on the economy than the market was pricing in.

Still, he said the stock sell-off looked like “more of a buying opportunity than a selling opportunity,” adding that he didn’t believe tariffs were creating systemic risks to the economy.

Economic chaos is likely if Trump doesn’t pause or scale back tariffs immediately, the billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman said Monday in a post on X.

Ackman, who endorsed Trump during the presidential race, urged the commander in chief to call off the tariffs for 90 days to allow the US and other countries to negotiate over trade policy.

“If, on the other hand, on April 9th we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocketbooks, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate,” the Pershing Square founder wrote.

In a separate post, Ackman said his firm wouldn’t dump its US stock holdings even if tariff fears sparked a massive price drop.

“We will suffer mark-to-market losses if the market crashes, but we will not be sellers in a declining market,” Ackman said, adding: “Over the long term, we are exposed to the health of our country and its economy. This is my only investment ‘conflict’ if you want to call it that.”

The stock sell-off could get even worse, said Boaz Weinstein, a famed hedge funder and the founder of Saba Capital Management. That’s because Trump’s trade war could rattle the bond market and spark a wave of bankruptcies, he told Bloomberg TV.

“This is not going to get fixed tomorrow. I believe you cannot put the genie back in the bottle,” Weinstein told the outlet in an interview published on Monday, pointing to reciprocal tariffs from China and other knock-on effects from Trump’s tariff plan.

“The avalanche has really just started,” he added. “The hit could be faster and the bankruptcy rate could spike much faster than other crises.”

Weinstein said he saw a “real possibility” of the US entering a severe recession, pointing to how the Smoot-Hawley tariffs worsened the economic situation leading into the Great Depression.

“There might be something in between that stops the boulder, but I’m very concerned about a crash,” he said.

In his annual letter to shareholders on Monday, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned of the impact of tariffs, saying the steep duties on US imports could slow growth and raise inflation.

“The recent tariffs will likely increase inflation and are causing many to consider a greater probability of a recession,” the billionaire banker wrote.

Dimon also mentioned stagflation, a scenario where economic growth stagnates while inflation stays high. Economists say such an outcome, which plagued the US economy in the 1970s, would be even harder for policymakers to deal with than a recession, as inflationary pressures would prevent the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates to stimulate the economy.

“This tug-of-war can go on for some time, but it’s good to remember that in the stagflation of the 1970s, recessions did not stop the inexorable trend of rising rates,” he added.

Speaking to Fox Business on Wednesday, Dimon said a recession was “a likely outcome.”

“Markets aren’t always right, but sometimes they are right. And I think this time they are right because they’re just pricing in uncertainty at the macro level and uncertainty at the micro level, at the actual company level,” he said.

Stanley Druckenmiller reiterated his stance against tariffs in an X post on Monday.

“I do not support tariffs exceeding 10% which I made abundantly clear in the interview you cite,” the top investor wrote in response to another post that featured a clip of a previous CNBC interview.

In the interview, Druckenmiller said he saw tariffs within “the 10% range” as the “lesser of two evils,” adding that he believed that duties on US imports were “simply a consumption tax” partly paid for by foreign countries.

Trump’s tariffs are having “very big impacts on markets and economies,” but there should be more focus on what caused them and the even greater disruptions ahead, Ray Dalio said in a LinkedIn post on Monday.

“The far bigger, far more important thing to keep in mind is that we are seeing a classic breakdown of the major monetary, political, and geopolitical orders,” he wrote, adding this kind of event only happened about once in a lifetime.

Dalio — the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates and the official mentor to the hedge fund’s three co-chief investors — said unsustainable debt levels, gaping divides between people, and the end of US global dominance are behind the current disorder.

He also pointed to increasingly disruptive acts of nature and technological innovations such as AI as key drivers of the ongoing changes.

Trump went too far with his tariffs, leaving investors shellshocked and the economy in danger, Brad Gerstner, the founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, told Fox Business on Monday.

Instead of precisely targeting import taxes at a few countries, the US “took out the bazooka,” he said. “These are not reciprocal tariffs — this is a nuclear-style assault on global business and it’s gonna land us in a recession.”

The veteran tech investor said Trump needs to show Wall Street he wants fair tariffs and isn’t “trying to unwind the entire global system of trade which has worked really well for America.”

Gerstner added that “credit markets are beginning to crack, and when that happens, we’re on the verge of throwing the US into a recession that you can’t easily get out of.” The US can’t “just push a button and magically this all resets.”

There are too many “unprecedented unknowns” in Trump’s trade war for forecasts and certainty in decisions, wrote Howard Marks, the cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management.

Investors also need to remember that “deciding not to act isn’t the opposite of acting; it’s an act in itself,” Marks wrote in a memo on April 9.

“The decision to not act — to leave a portfolio unchanged — should be scrutinized as critically as a decision to make changes,” he wrote.

“The old saws that are the refuge of terrified investors — ‘we’re not going to try to catch a falling knife’ and ‘we should wait for the dust to settle and the uncertainty to be resolved’ — cannot in themselves be allowed to determine our behavior,” wrote Marks.

Negative developments that cause massive price slumps are “terrifying” and discourage buying. “But, when unfavorable developments are raining down, that’s often the best time to step up,” he wrote.

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