Getty ImagesDuring his election campaign last year, Donald Trump promised Americans he would usher in a new era of prosperity.
Now two months into his presidency, he’s painting a slightly different picture.
He has warned that it will be hard to bring down prices and the public should be prepared for a “little disturbance” before he can bring back wealth to the US.
Meanwhile, analysts say the odds of a downturn are increasing, pointing to his policies.
So is Trump about to trigger a recession in the world’s largest economy?
Markets fall and recession risks rise
In the US, a recession is defined as a prolonged and widespread decline in economic activity typically characterised by a jump in unemployment and fall in incomes.
A chorus of economic analysts have warned in recent days that the risks of such a scenario are rising.
A JP Morgan report put the chance of recession at 40%, up from 30% at the start of the year, warning that US policy was “tilting away from growth”, while Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, upped the odds from 15% to 35%, citing tariffs.
The forecasts came as the S&P 500, which tracks 500 of the biggest companies in the US sank sharply. It has now fallen to its lowest level since September in a sign of fears about the future.
The market turmoil is being driven partly by concerns about new taxes on imports, called tariffs, which Trump has introduced since he took office.
He has hit products from America’s three biggest trade partners with the new duties, and threatened them more widely in moves that analysts believe will increase prices and curb growth.
Trump and his economic advisers have been warning the public to be prepared for some economic pain, while appearing to dismiss the market concerns – a marked change from his first term, when he frequently cited the stock market as a measure of his own success.
“There will always be changes and adjustments,” he said last week, in response to pleas from businesses for more certainty.
The posture has increased investor worries about his plans.
Goldman Sachs last week raised its recession bets from 15% to 20%, saying it saw policy changes as “the key risk” to the economy. But it noted that the White House still had “the option to pull back if the downside risks begin to look more serious”.
“If the White House remained committed to its policies even in the face of much worse data, recession risk would rise further,” the firm’s analysts warned.
Tariffs, uncertainty and slowing growth
For many firms, the biggest question mark is tariffs, which raise costs for US businesses by putting taxes on imports. As Trump unveils tariff plans, many companies are now facing lower profit margins, while holding off on investments and hiring as they try to figure out what the future will look like.
Investors are also worried about big cuts to the government workforce and government spending.
Brian Gardner, chief of Washington policy strategy at the investment bank Stifel, said businesses and investors had thought Trump intended tariffs as a negotiating tool.
“But what the president and his cabinet are signalling is actually a bigger deal. It’s a restructuring of the American economy,” he said. “And that’s what’s been driving markets in the last couple of weeks.”
The US economy was already undergoing a slowdown, engineered in part by the central bank, which has kept interest rates higher to try to cool activity and stabilise prices.
In recent weeks, some data suggests a more rapid weakening.
Retail sales fell in February, confidence – which had popped after Trump’s election on several surveys of consumers and businesses – has fallen, and companies including major airlines, retailers such as Walmart and Target, and manufacturers are warning of a pullback.
Some analysts are worried a drop in the stock market could trigger a further clampdown in spending, especially among higher income households.
That could deliver a major hit to the US economy, which is driven by consumer spending and has grown increasingly dependent on those richer households, as lower income families face pressure from inflation.
The head of the US central bank, Jerome Powell, offered assurances in a speech last week, noting that sentiment had not been a good indicator of behaviour in recent years.
“Despite elevated levels of uncertainty, the US economy continues to be in a good place,” he said.
But the US economy is currently deeply linked to the rest of the world, warned Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB.
“The fact that tariffs could disrupt that at the same time that there were signs that the US economy was weakening anyway .. is really fuelling recession fears,” she says.
Stock market in tech ripe for correction
The unease in the stock market isn’t all about Trump.
Investors were already jittery about the possibility of a correction, after big gains over the last two years, driven by the sharp run-up in tech stocks fuelled by investor optimism about artificial intelligence (AI),
Chipmaker Nvidia, for example, saw its share price jump from less than $15 at the start of 2023 to nearly $150 in November of last year.
That type of rise had stirred debate about an “AI bubble” – with investors on high alert for signs of it bursting, which would have a big impact on the stock market, regardless of the dynamics in the wider economy.
Now, with views of the US economy darkening, optimism about AI is getting even harder to sustain.
Tech analyst Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management wrote on social media this week that his optimism had “taken a step back” as the chance of a recession increased “measurably” over the past month.
“The bottom line is that if we enter a recession, it will be extremely difficult for the AI trade to continue,” he said.
