Stock plunge on Trump's tariffs despite strong jobs report

Wall Street kicked off Friday with another brutal stretch of losses driven by President Trump's new tariffs despite stronger than expected March jobs data.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down more than 1,200 points shortly before 10:30 a.m. EDT Friday, a day after the market suffered its worse single-day of trading in five years.

The S&P 500 index was down 3.6 percent, and the Nasdaq composite was down 3.5 percent.

All three major indexes took serious losses Thursday, the first full day of trading after Trump's announcement of up to $600 billion in new import taxes. The scale and scope of Trump's tariffs shocked investors, who had already been selling off stocks in anticipation of a global slowdown.

The president and his administration are trying to quell concerns about the state of the economy, insisting that the U.S. will be far better off after adjusting to higher taxes on foreign goods.

“We’re feeling good. Look, I frankly thought, in some ways, it could be worse on the markets, because this is a big transition,” Vice President Vance told Newsmax in an interview on Thursday.

“We have to remember that for 40 years, American economic policy has rewarded people who ship jobs overseas. It’s taxed our workers, it’s made our supply chains more brittle and it’s made our country less prosperous, less free and less secure.”

The March jobs report, which was released Friday before markets opened, also showed unexpectedly strong employment growth.

The U.S. economy added 228,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate stayed roughly even at 4.2 percent, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department, far better than the 135,000 jobs economists expected to see, according to consensus projections.

The strong jobs data, however, did little to calm worries about the future.

"The potential for outright fall in jobs is rising. Households are worried about the hit to spending power from tariffs, the chart below shows they are also worried about potentially losing their jobs. Government austerity set to be increasingly noticed and equity markets are sliding leading to the conclusion that sentiment is undoubtedly souring," James Knightley, chief international economist at AIG, wrote in a Friday analysis.