Bill Ackman said the US is “heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter.” Boaz Weinstein predicted the “avalanche has really just started.” And Jamie Dimon warned it “may be disastrous in the long run.”
One by one, many of the biggest names across Wall Street — some of whom supported President Donald Trump during his election bid last year, and others who merely hoped for looser regulation and economic growth under his administration — are speaking out against his decision to unleash expansive tariffs worldwide, plunging global markets into chaos.
The new trade regime is a “mistake”, says hedge fund titan Bill Ackman.Credit: Bloomberg
The widening criticism comes as Trump offers no indication he’s prepared to claw back a punishing trade overhaul set to begin on April 9. Overnight, he threatened to increase tariffs on China. With the S&P 500 falling almost 20 per cent from its most recent peak, the index is on the precipice of the first bear market since 2022. The Nasdaq 100 Index has already breached the level, and at Friday’s close was down about 22 per cent from its most recent high.
Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest US bank, used his closely watched annual shareholder letter to call for a speedy resolution to the uncertainties sparked by the trade policy and warned against a potentially disastrous fragmentation of America’s long-term economic alliances.
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“The quicker this issue is resolved, the better because some of the negative effects increase cumulatively over time and would be hard to reverse,” Dimon wrote in the letter on Monday. While the comments didn’t criticise Trump himself, they are a shift from the support or careful silence that Wall Street has largely deployed since the election.
Weinstein, founder of Saba Capital Management, said on Friday that the trade war threatened to accelerate the selloff in corporate bonds and spur a wave of bankruptcies. Oaktree Capital Management co-Chairman Howard Marks said in a Bloomberg Television interview on Friday that the latest tariffs imposed by President Trump helped set off a cascade of unknown — and unknowable — factors for investors to weigh as they choose where to deploy cash. Daniel Loeb, founder of Third Point, said on X that it “will be a test of the administration’s judgment versus ideology how they resolve this” in coming days.
“I strongly believe launching tariffs on April 9th against the entire world — massively in excess of what we are being charged — is a mistake,” Ackman, founder of Pershing Square and vocal Trump supporter, wrote on X, saying in a separate post that “we should start hunkering down” if a “time out” isn’t called on the tariffs.
A 90-day pause is needed to give Trump time to “carefully and strategically resolve our historically unfair global trading position,” Ackman wrote.
