Atlanta Fed projecting economic downturn, as markets tumble on tariffs news

The stock market isn’t the economy, but the Dow losing 1.48 percent of its market value, the S&P 500 losing 1.76 percent, the NASDAQ losing 2.64 percent, on top of the Atlanta Fed forecasting a 2.8 percent GDP decline in the first quarter, none of this is good news.

And here you all voted for Donald Trump because you came to believe that you should trust him more on the economy.

The markets were roiled on Monday after Trump inexplicably revived his dumb tariffs on Canada and Mexico, supposedly to get them to do more to combat the flow of fentanyl into our borders.

“No room left, for Mexico or for Canada. No, the tariffs, you know, they’re all set. They go into effect tomorrow,” Trump said at a press conference at the White House on Monday afternoon, which, if you were watching on one of the financial news channels, you could literally watch the markets take a nose-dive in real time as he said the words.

As recently as Feb. 19, less than two weeks ago, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model was forecasting relatively healthy 2.3 percent GDP growth in the first quarter of 2025, which covers the period Jan. 1-March 31.

The market being down affects you if you have money in the market; GDP decline of 2.8 percent, which would be comparable to the first three quarters of the Great Recession of 2007-2009, affects everybody’s bottom line.

And this is before we get the full effects of the hundreds of thousands of federal job cuts, the dramatic cuts to social safety net spending that will take money out of the pockets of low-income Americans, all to pay pennies on the dollar for deep tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, which because they’re not going to be paid for, are going to run up the national debt.

You wanted the price of eggs to get back to reasonable.

You were assuming you’d still have a job, or that the Social Security check would hit your bank account like always.

Silly you, for assuming.