Stocks slide further as President Trump doubles down on Greenland ambitions despite European pushback
With US exchanges shut yesterday, traders are finally getting the chance to react to the president’s tariff threats and escalation over Greenland. The only winners so far are precious metals like gold and silver.
Futures on the SPDR S&P 500 ETF were down as much as 1.8% this morning, with a sea of red in premarket trading as US investors finally got their opportunity to react to President Trump’s various Greenland escalations.
In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump warned that the US would impose tariffs on European countries — Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland — unless a deal is reached for the “Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.” The touted 10% tariffs on “any and all goods” shipped to the US from the eight countries would take effect February 1, rising to 25% by the start of June if an agreement isn’t reached.
After pushback from European leaders continued on Monday, Trump doubled down, saying that the US doesn’t think European leaders will push back “too much” and that the US has to have the semiautonomous Danish region. He also posted a rebuke of the UK’s strategy surrounding the Chagos Islands, as well as what appears to be an AI-generated image of himself planting an American flag on the island — another move that has pushed risk-on assets lower on Tuesday morning.
A number of private messages between the president and European leaders have also been released, with Trump explaining in one text exchange between himself and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Støre that not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is figuring in his current approach:
“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway?”
Amid the sea of red, precious metals (once again) are shining. Spot gold has gained another 3%, taking it to a record $4,736 per ounce, while silver also leaped to a new high of $95.26 per ounce, extending its remarkable rally.
High-beta stocks, including many of the darlings of the AI trade, look set to open sharply lower, with Big Tech also feeling the crunch in premarket trading. A broad swath of tech stocks are lower, including Tesla, Nvidia, Micron, Alphabet, Advanced Micro Devices, Palantir, Sandisk, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle, and Strategy, all of which are down about 2% or lower at 5:55 a.m. ET, as traders brace for further policy signals on the second day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the president is set to continue meeting with European leaders.
On the continent itself, stocks slid once again, with the flagship European Index, the STOXX 600, shedding 1.2% as of 5:55 a.m. ET, adding to a similar drop yesterday. Equities also slumped in Asia for a second consecutive day.
The fact that the president has yet to show any real interest in dialing down his Greenland plans has spooked markets, which had previously priced any significant escalation of a trade war as relatively unlikely.
As we noted yesterday, one popular market narrative over the last year has been that President Trump often employs tariffs as a threat, using them primarily as a tool to bargain with. But the “Trump Always Chickens Out” argument isn’t really borne out by the data. As Luke Kawa pointed out last year, the reality is that the US has raised its levies rate on both occasions that Trump has been in the White House, suggesting that the more accurate acronym is really: “Trump Always Raises Tariffs.” With the prospect of European retaliation, and the president’s stance seemingly hardening, the risks to global trade seem a lot higher than they were a week ago.
