President Donald Trump’s trade policies are roiling financial markets and escalating recession fears.
Some executives are using terms such as “disastrous” and “economic nuclear winter” to describe White House plans, unveiled last week, to impose 10 percent levies on all imported goods, as well as higher, country-specific rates on about 60 countries.
At least one professor praised the idea of tariffs, and one investor, noting the nation’s need to bring down borrowing, called tariffs better than higher taxes. But both of them had qualms with certain aspects of Trump’s plans.
Here’s what an array of business and economic leaders are saying Trump’s tariffs could mean for the economy.
Jamie Dimon
The chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, warned Monday that Trump’s tariff policies could be “disastrous in the long run” in his annual shareholder letter. The trade policies will drive up inflation on imported goods and domestic prices, he wrote.
The damage tariffs could cause to consumer confidence, investments, corporate profits and the U.S. dollar would be “hard to reverse,” and uncertainty over how the trade moves will play out must get resolved quickly, Dimon wrote.
“Whether or not the menu of tariffs causes a recession remains in question, but it will slow down growth,” he said.
Dimon’s attitude toward tariffs has evolved as Trump’s plans have become clearer. In January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Dimon told CNBC that people should “get over it” if tariffs were inflationary but good for national security. In Monday’s shareholder letter, he said that industrial policies such as tariffs “should be done right or not at all.”
“Economics is the longtime glue, and America First is fine, as long as it doesn’t end up being America alone.”
Stan Druckenmiller
The billionaire investor and lifelong Republican, who mentored Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at George Soros’s hedge fund, affirmed his opposition to Trump’s tariffs in a Sunday post on X: “I do not support tariffs exceeding 10%.”
In a January interview with CNBC, Druckenmiller said tariffs were the “the lesser of two evils” when compared to an income tax hike. The risks associated with tariffs “in the 10 percent range” were overblown compared to the rewards, he said at the time.
“Because we have a fiscal problem, we need revenues,” he said. “Tariffs will generate revenues.”
Oren Cass
The chief economist at American Compass, a conservative economic think tank, wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday that Trump’s 10 percent global tariff is the right starting point for a “desperately needed” reordering of the global economic system. Cass equated last week’s “Liberation Day” to D-Day, emphasizing that the World War II campaign was “just the start” of a campaign that was ultimately victorious.
“With the tariffs, too, success or failure depends on what happens next, and the nation will have to bear real costs while the outcome hangs in the balance,” he wrote. “… But there are simple steps the administration could take now to correct course and move from its embattled beachhead into a sustainable forward position.”
The administration should scale up its country-specific tariffs more gradually to give markets and trading partners time to adapt, Cass wrote. Trump should also better articulate the concessions he expects from allies and common policies toward China that all trading partners should adopt, he wrote.
“The president should want to minimize the short- and medium-term harm to businesses and supply chains that must survive disruption if they are to thrive in the long run,” he wrote.
Aaron Levie
The chief executive of Box, a cloud company, shared an analysis over the weekend from Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives that cautioned that tariffs would set the tech sector back a decade and severely hinder its ability to compete with China.
“CEOs with large global supply chains can’t be outspoken on this topic publicly because they need to cut deals,” Levie wrote Saturday on X. “But this is the tone of the convos happening right now.”
In a separate X post on Monday, he emphasized how “the goal posts can just keep moving” when tariff policy hinges upon “funny math.” Economists have overwhelmingly lambasted the formula Trump used to calculate tariff rates for each country as “arbitrary” and “indefensible.”
“It’s hard to overstate the negative impact of these tariffs if they go through,” Levie wrote in another post. “It will require broad price changes that the market likely won’t bear. That means companies have to reassess every aspect of their business on a dime. The ripple effects of this are vast.”
Michael Gregory
The U.S. economy stands to take a “huge hit” from Trump’s trade policies, even if many country-specific rates get renegotiated, the deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets told investors Monday. Businesses need to make decisions based on the tariff information they have now, and the impact of the White House’s unsophisticated, uncertain policies create a losing environment for businesses, he said.
The administration’s tariff calculation was supposed to offset the global effects of tariff and nontariff barriers on U.S. businesses, he said. But the formula was “far from what was intended to be.”
BMO lowered its forecast for U.S. economic growth and raised its projection for core inflation in response to the trade moves last week, Gregory added.
“One of the legacies of protectionism is you get sub-performance of the economy, lack of productivity growth and lack of innovation,” Gregory said. “We could be now on the cusp of such a profile.”
Christopher Tang
Before Trump unveiled his tariff plans, Tang, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, published an op-ed in Barron’s emphasizing that reciprocal tariffs could “initiate a transformative shift toward a fairer, universal tariff system” and revitalize U.S. manufacturing. Past U.S. trade and tariff policies were littered with issues and failed to incentivize reshoring, Tang wrote.
But companies can’t expand their U.S. manufacturing capabilities without more policy clarity from the administration, Tang subsequently wrote Sunday on LinkedIn, after Trump’s announcement. Tang called the Trump plan “comprehensive” but also “fluid and fickle.”
“Without a long-term clear commitment, firms cannot afford to make billions of dollars in investments on a lurch,” Tang wrote.
David Ricks
Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff plans exempted pharmaceuticals imported to the U.S., but the administration’s strategy could still harm drug research and development, the Eli Lilly chief executive said in a Friday interview with the BBC.
Industry leaders are bracing for pharmaceutical-specific tariffs and should they materialize, Eli Lilly will have to “eat the cost and make trade-offs,” especially in its research, Ricks told the BBC. Most pharmaceutical development happens in the United States, but production is heavily centered in other countries, he said.
“I think it’s a pivot in U.S. policy and it feels like it’ll be hard to come back from here,” Ricks said.
Dan Loeb
The founder of New York-based Third Point echoed concerns from fellow hedge fund managers when he highlighted potential “conceptual” and “practical” errors with the administration’s tariff announcement and calculations in a Saturday post on X.
“It will be a test of the administration’s judgment versus ideology how they resolve this,” he wrote.
Elon Musk
One of Trump’s most ardent supporters and a key member of his administration, the world’s richest man said during a virtual appearance Saturday at an Italian political rally that he wants a “free trade zone” between Europe and the U.S. The comments came the same day Trump’s 10 percent levies on all imports went into effect. “I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move, ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation,” Musk said.
He also took a shots at one of the main architects of Trump’s tariff policies, fellow White House adviser Peter Navarro, in a post on X over the weekend, saying, “A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing.”
Tesla, the source of much of Musk’s wealth, now faces 25 percent tariffs on all auto imports, which the White House implemented Thursday. The electric-vehicle maker’s sales have recently dragged amid growing backlash to Musk’s role within the administration, and tariff pressures have already weighed on competitors such as General Motors and Stellantis.
Bill Ackman
The hedge fund billionaire, who endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, warned over the weekend that the president’s sweeping tariff plan would cause irreparable damage to the U.S. economy.
The U.S. is “heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down,” Ackman wrote in a Sunday post on X.
