Trump Didn’t Read the Fine Print on His Election Win

The next to last draft of this column started with the line: “Both consumers and the markets are showing serious signs of the jitters.”

But then my plane landed, and I checked the markets again, once they had closed for the day. At that point, “jitters” seemed like a bit of an understatement. The Dow average of 30 major stocks dropped 890 points for the day, a decline of 2.08 percent and 4 percent below its level at the time of President Trump’s election last November. The broad-based S&P 500 declined by 2.7 percent and the Nasdaq Composite dropped by 4 percent. Taken together, these are not the signs of investors who are getting tired of winning.

The behavior of investors comes on top of the growing concern among consumers, whose spending represents about 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

The prospect of widespread tariffs has taken the trade-policy debate from the abstract to the very real. Increasingly, tariffs are seen less as giving the finger to countries that some think have taken advantage of us, and more as an