The Daily Fuckup

Stocks slid again on March 10 as investors tried to price in a tariff campaign that has changed fast enough to keep businesses and markets on edge. Trump had already imposed 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, then paused those tariffs for goods covered under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, while leaving the broader threat of reciprocal tariffs set for April 2. The result is not just a dispute over trade policy. It is a moving target.

That matters because companies do not build plans around slogans. They build them around costs, timelines and rules they can trust. When tariffs arrive, get narrowed, and then give way to another round of promised measures, firms are left deciding whether to absorb higher costs, pass them along or reshuffle supply chains. The more often the policy changes, the harder it becomes to treat it as something managers can model with confidence.

The White House brushed off the market drop. In a March 10 pool report, a White House official said there was a “strong divergence” between the stock market’s “animal spirits” and what businesses and business leaders are actually signaling, and argued the latter matters more for the medium- and long-term outlook. Press secretary Kush Desai later said companies had responded to Trump’s economic agenda with investment commitments and job creation. Neither answer addressed the central problem for investors: the tariff sequence itself keeps changing.

Trump has argued that any pain will be temporary and that tariffs will eventually leave the United States with better terms. That argument depends on leverage, but it also depends on predictability. A tariff system that firms can understand is one thing. A tariff system that gets announced, pared back for some goods and then followed by another deadline is another. Markets are reacting to that uncertainty as much as they are to the tariffs themselves.