Mark Zandi:
Well, clearly, it slows the economy down.
I mean, just to put this into a little bit of context, the economy came into the year performing very well, had an exceptional year in 2024, lots of growth, lots of jobs, unemployment 4 percent, very, very low. So it looked like it could weather a lot of storms.
But the tariffs is stacking up to be a pretty significant storm. And if it continues to rage, if we don’t see some clarity here pretty soon, within weeks, I think businesses are going to start pulling back. We are going to start to see job loss. We potentially could suffer a recession.
Now, in President Trump’s first term, we kind of sort of went down this path to a significant degree, and the president was very responsive to what he saw in the stock market. The stock market sold off. He was listening to businesspeople, and he ultimately struck a deal with the Chinese. That’s who he imposed the tariffs on, and things cooled off, life went on, and we made our way through.
Hopefully, that’s the same thing that happens here relatively soon, very soon, that he does decide to figure out how to strike a deal and cool things off and get back to business, because if he doesn’t, if the administration doesn’t do this, then we’re going to be facing a recession, and that means job loss and lost income and lost wealth.
Nobody wants that.
