Last week the White House dropped a bombshell: Trump will impose an import tariff of 25% on steel imports and 10% on aluminum imports. For how long the import tariffs will apply, remains unclear. Stock market dropped violently in reaction to the news: the news seems to have surprised investors, despite the fact that Trump on multiple occasions threatened to impose import taxes to “help the domestic industry.” Industrial and manufacturing jobs should come back to the US, according to Trump.

What a difference can a few days make! When on February 2 it was announced that wages in the U.S. rose by 2.9 percent (and that, after a revision, wages in December rose a bit more than previously estimated), stock market prices began to swing violently. Stock market indexes lost hundreds of points per minute and long-term interest rates rose to heights last seen in 2014. At times, investors even began to believe that the official rate in the US will be raised four times and not three times, as

Last week on Monday, the Dow Jones index lost more than a thousand points for the first time in history, a drop of 4.6%. This correction followed a decline in stock prices that had already started on the Friday before, although few investors had anticipated that the index would fall by this much. On Tuesday and Wednesday, stock prices seemed to recover somewhat, but on Thursday the most important indices in the United States fell again considerably.

Last week’s correction seems dramatic, but we should not forget that it comes off the back of an exceptional rise in January. At the time of writing, the Dow Jones is around 24,000 points, the same level as at the end of November last year. The broad S&P 500 index closed at just below 2,600 points on Thursday, which is also comparable to