NIGHTMARE ON WALL STREET

INSIDE THE TARIFF-INDUCED MARKET TURMOIL SCARING TRADERS STIFF.

- JEN WIECZNER

IT WAS LUNCHTIME AT the New York Stock Exchange, and Peter Tuchman was standing on a balcony surveying the scene, one side of his unruly white hair flaring up jaggedly like a market chart. It was Wednesday, April 9, a week after President Donald Trump announced a series of astronomical tariffs on nearly every country in the world, including tiny Antarctic islands inhabited only by penguins, seals, and other wildlife. The S&P 500 was eerily flat for the day, but the so-called Fear Index—or VIX, a measure of the market's volatility—was disturbingly high, as if what Tuchman was observing were an ocean whose glassy surface belied the currents swirling dangerously below. Tuchman has worked on the floor of the NYSE for 40 years—through 1987's Black Monday, the dot-com bust, the Great Recession, the pandemic—and had never seen anything play out quite like the crash of the past week. “People are, you know, freaking a bit,” he said. “I mean, everyone in here has probably got a 401(k), and suddenly their 401(k) is a 101(k).”

The NYSE has always been a place friendly to the conservative, pro-business side of the political ledger, but lately it has become a lot Trumpier. In one firm's booth, MAGA hats hung on neat white hooks above each Bloomberg terminal and TRUMP was emblazoned on the mouse pads—what Tuchman called the MAGA Pavilion. Recent events, however, had required some extreme mental gymnastics to justify the sledgehammer effect Trump's tariffs have had on everything from the traders’ retirement savings to the global economic order, which just a week before rested on that rock-solid pillar known as the United States of America. “Most of the floor are Trumpers, and they still think this makes sense, and I still don’t get it,” Tuchman said.