La Jornada editorial from Mexico City on March 11, 2025
Illustration: Getty Images, I stock
The extremism and lack of coherence that have characterized Donald Trump’s administration in the less than two months he has been in the White House have caused economic setbacks that yesterday led to a fall in the stock markets, both at home and abroad: on Wall Street the S&P and Dow Jones indexes reached record lows, while the Nasdaq, which brings together the main technology companies, sank 4 percent; European stock markets retreated in the face of the US president’s repeated, confusing and misleading threats about the imposition of tariffs; oil prices were not spared and the Mexican Stock Exchange lost 2.11 percent, while the national currency fell 0.47.
Estimates of US economic growth for this year have also been reduced from 2.2 to 1.7 percent, and financial analysts see an increased likelihood of the superpower experiencing a recession in 2026.
There is no doubt that the most important circumstantial factor in this gloomy panorama is Trump’s enormous stubbornness in using threats of economic sanctions for political purposes — a common practice of all Washington governments, but one that the New York magnate has taken to an extreme level of stridency — and his insistence on implementing more than drastic cuts in the structure of the state, public spending and social programs.
Paradoxically, these attitudes not only cause enormous damage to the less favored sectors of American society, but have also seriously harmed the technology companies whose three main potentates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, mobilized in support of Trump’s campaign for a second presidential term. In the case of the former, his star firm, the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, has lost 40 percent of its value this year.
On the other hand, we should not ignore an element unrelated to Trump and his government: the loss of competitiveness of the US industrial sectors –both conventional and digital– compared to their Chinese rivals, which have recently surprised in different fields, such as electronics in general, the aerospace and military industry and artificial intelligence.
The truth is that the aggressive and dissociated policy of Trumpism — whose incoherence seems to reflect deep struggles within the US business oligarchy — not only leads to the threat of trade wars, but also to an involuntary threat: that of causing the worst global recession in decades. From this perspective, the promised era of “greatness” that Trump has offered his country could instead lead to a time of weakness, decline and widespread poverty, and even greater political destabilization than is already being experienced in what is still presented as the most powerful nation in the world.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English