Pulse News

**How Trump Volatility Is Freezing Business Decisions**

By Martin Peers

Mar 4, 2025, 5:00pm PST

There's an old joke that if you're unhappy about the weather in San Francisco, you only have to wait a few minutes until it changes. That line is beginning to seem applicable to the Trump administration's tariff plans. Late Tuesday afternoon—after the stock market closed on the second successive sell-off sparked by President Donald Trump's imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico—Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Fox Business News that "we will probably be announcing" on Wednesday a compromise on those tariffs.

Cue the market recovery likely to come on Wednesday, which should at least partly reverse the total 3% drop in the S&P 500 over the past two days. Still, while the business community likely welcomed Lutnick's comments, no one can relax. Given that in the interview Lutnick seemed to make the rate of U.S. fentanyl deaths the determining factor for whether tariffs are necessary, there's no guarantee Trump won't again change his mind in a few weeks.

And that's a big problem: Businesses need certainty to make investment decisions, and certainty is something that is in short supply nowadays. The new administration was expected to usher in a new period of dealmaking, thanks to a lighter regulatory hand. Instead, aside from artificial intelligence-related fundraising, we haven't seen much in the way of big new deals. In fact, business news generally is thin on the ground lately—as though businesspeople everywhere are frozen in their tracks by the constant upheaval coming out of Washington.

The silver lining in the cloud is that any retreat on the tariffs, after two days of market selling, will suggest Trump is as sensitive to the stock market as many observers had hoped. As this Bloomberg story today highlighted, that belief seemed shaky earlier today. Still, we're only two months into Trump's four-year term. What's next?

**An E-Commerce Tariffs Winner**

Today's tariff drama was bad for shares of pretty much any business that manufactures or moves physical goods across international borders, including retailers. But one company that benefited was ThredUp, an online consignment and thrift store that sells affordable used clothing. ThredUp says it's likely to benefit from tariffs, which could spark more penny-pinching among shoppers.

ThredUp has been a dog of a stock since its 2021 listing, when it traded as high as $27—lately its shares were around one-tenth of that level. But on Tuesday, the stock rallied throughout the day and closed up 7%, or 16 cents. The only problem was, after Lutnick signaled a possible tariff retreat, ThredUp stock fell 6% in after-hours trading. Oops.