The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks ... (and) without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments.

“This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry,” he said. “The economic value of entire regions – coastal, arid, wildfire-prone – will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice, rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like.”

No governments will realistically be able to cover the damage when multiple high-cost events happen in rapid succession ...

Global financial markets have been plunged into turmoil as Donald Trump’s escalating trade war knocked trillions of dollars off the value of the world’s biggest companies and heightened fears of a US recession. As world leaders reacted to the US president’s “liberation day” tariff policies demolishing the international trading order, about $2tn (£1.5tn) was wiped off Wall Street and share prices in other financial centres across the globe.
Experts said Trump’s sweeping border taxes of between 10% and 50% on the US’s traditional allies and enemies alike had dramatically added to the risk of a steep global downturn and a recession in the world’s biggest economy. The sell-off swept the globe, sending exchanges plunging in Asia and Europe.
When New York trading opened, the S&P 500 index of the US’s leading companies fell by as much as 4.3% in morning trading, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq fund down 5.1%. Meanwhile, the US dollar hit a six-month low, falling by about 2.2% on Thursday morning, amid a growing loss of confidence in a currency that had previously been considered the safest in the world for most of the past century.
Warning clients to beware a “dollar confidence crisis”, George Saravelos, the head of foreign exchange research at Deutsche Bank, said: “The safe-haven properties of the dollar are being eroded.” The heaviest falls in share prices on Thursday were reserved for US firms with complex international supply chains stretching into the countries that Trump is targeting with billions of dollars in fresh border taxes.
Apple, which makes most of its iPhones, tablets and other devices for the US market in China, plunged by as much as 9.5%, along with steep declines for other large multinationals including Microsoft, Nvidia, Dell and HP. Commodities fell sharply, including a 7% plunge in oil prices, reflecting growing concerns over the global economic outlook.
In a typically defiant response on Thursday, Trump used his Truth Social platform to declare that the his plan was working. “THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
Tariffs will fall heavily on some of the world’s poorest countries, with nations in south-east Asia, including Myanmar, among the most affected. Cambodia, where about one in five of the population lives below the poverty line, was the worst-hit country in the region with a tariff rate of 49%. Vietnam faces 46% tariffs and Myanmar, reeling from a devastating earthquake and years of civil war after a 2021 military coup, was hit with 44%.
Analysts warned that garment and sports shoe makers, which rely heavily on production in south-east Asia, face rising costs, which will push up prices for consumers around the globe. The share prices of Nike, Adidas and Puma all fell steeply. Analysts said Trump’s measures would raise the average tariff, or border tax, charged by the US to the highest level since 1933, in a development that threatened to sink the US into recession while increasing living costs for consumers.
The non-partisan Tax Foundation thinktank said it estimated the plan would represent a “$1.8tn tax hike” for US consumers, which would cause imports to fall by more than a quarter, or $900bn, in 2025. While the measures will hit the US hard, researchers at the consultancy Oxford Economics said they could sink global economic growth to the lowest annual rate since the 2008 financial crisis, barring the height of the Covid pandemic.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Trump’s decision to impose tariffs of 20% on EU goods was “brutal and unfounded”, while Germany’s outgoing chancellor, Olaf Scholz, called it “fundamentally wrong”. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the “protectionist” tariffs ran “contrary to the interests of millions of citizens on this side of the Atlantic and in the US”.
The EU is thought to be preparing retaliatory tariffs on US consumer and industrial goods – likely to include emblematic products such as orange juice, blue jeans and Harley-Davidson motorbikes – to be announced in mid-April, in response to steel and aluminium tariffs previously announced by Trump.

FWIW, all SELLs (per above posts) have been entered today.
Reduced stock exposure by ~50%.
Parking proceeds in VMRXX, FZDXX and will likely BUY a coupla new rungs on 5-yr CDs ladder that virtually guarantees a net positive TR in 2025.
Kudos to @larryB for this thread.
(Sadly) Timely and actionable.
EDIT: NOT saying this strategy is correct for anyone other than me and the missus.
BUT, our #1 goal this year, after two monster stock gain years under a REAL president, was to NOT allow the buffoon's asinine fiscal policies (read, orange brain farts) to cause us to be anything but net positive for the year on 12/31/25. And that goal has virtually been guaranteed with these moves today. Plus, we will sleep MUCH better thru year-end!

@Crash- For some twenty years I did my best to "manage" a small-appliance service business, with a number of employees. You would have to have been in business to understand that for smaller operations it is rarely possible to "absorb" significant added costs- the profit margin is simply not great enough to allow that.

Rising costs for screws are rippling through manufacturing supply chains. President Trump’s tariffs implemented this month on steel and aluminum imports have scrambled the supply chains of companies that make everything from car parts to appliances and football helmets to lawn mowers. The latest tariffs cover a wider range of imports, including the screws, nails and bolts that serve as the connective tissue in manufacturing.
That has set off a hunt to find domestic supplies of some of manufacturing’s smallest components. Manufacturing executives said the U.S. doesn’t have the plants to churn out the amount of steel wire or screws and other fasteners needed to displace imports. The production capacity we need doesn’t exist here in the U.S.,” said Gene Simpson, president of fastener maker Semblex. “It’s a select group of suppliers.”
About $178 billion of steel and aluminum products imported by the U.S. last year are now subject to a 25% tariff, according to Jason Miller, a supply-chain management professor at Michigan State University: “It’s a shockingly large number of parts”. American companies also can no longer petition the Commerce Department for tariff exemptions on specific products that aren’t sufficiently available in the U.S. The enlarged tariff pushes up the cost of a 10-cent screw from China to 17 cents for an importer.
At AlphaUSA, about half the of the materials that the Michigan-based auto-parts manufacturer purchases are fasteners. Many of them are made outside the U.S., particularly in Canada, which is now subject to the 25% duty after being exempted for years. President Chuck Dardas saidt he company’s customers are very religious about their quality standards, and often request specialized parts for assembly lines. Dardas added that many U.S. companies that make fasteners purchase the steel for them from Canada as well.
Price-sensitive customers
The situation for the auto industry became more complicated Wednesday, when Trump announced an additional 25% levy on imports of car and auto parts. The effects of the tariffs are expected to be felt quickly, as many suppliers have said they are unable to absorb added costs from new levies. And companies that use screws and other metal parts covered by tariffs say their customers won’t tolerate price increases. Some construction contractors may delay projects until they get a handle on how to blunt the effects of import duties.
Simpson’s firm Semblex produces fasteners for automobiles, industrial lighting, farm equipment and heavy-duty commercial trucks. To make those fasteners, the company uses specialty steel wire. It imports more than half of the wire it uses, mostly from Canada. As tariffs make imports more expensive, American steel wire producers are raising their prices at the same time. Simpson said cost increases for steel are difficult to quickly pass along to customers, especially in the automotive industry where prices are often locked in monthslong contracts.