Wall Street drops 3% despite encouraging inflation data as Trump’s trade war still weighs

Stocks drop after Trump's tariff pause, with S&P 500 down 3.2% and Dow Jones down 2.7%. Market remains volatile.

U.S. stocks on Thursday (April 10, 2025) are giving back a chunk of their historic gains from the day before as Wall Street weighs a global trade war that has cooled in temperature but is still threatening the economy.

The S&P 500 was down 3.2% in midday trading, a day after surging 9.5% following President Donald Trump’s decision to pause many of his tariffs worldwide. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1,079 points, or 2.7%, as of 11 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 3.8% lower.

Even a better-than-expected report on inflation Thursday morning wasn’t enough to get U.S. stocks to add to their surges from the day before, including the S&P 500’s third-best since 1940. Economists said the data wasn’t very useful because it offered a view only of the past, when inflation may rise in coming months because of tariffs.

“Trump blinks,” UBS strategist Bhanu Baweja wrote in a report about the President’s decision on tariffs, “but the damage isn’t all undone.”

Mr. has focused more on China, raising his tariffs on its products to well above 100%. Even if that were to get negotiated down to something like 50%, and even if only 10% tariffs remained on other countries, Mr. Baweja said the hit to the U.S. economy could still be large enough to hurt expected growth for upcoming U.S. corporate profits.

China, meanwhile, has reached out to other countries around the world in hopes of forming a united front against Trump.

The stock price of Warner Brothers Discovery, the company behind “A Minecraft Movie,” dropped 11.9% for one of Wall Street's sharpest losses after China said Thursday it will “appropriately reduce the number of imported U.S. films.” The Walt Disney Co.'s stock sank 6.2%