Amsterdam stock market plunges 7% at open as trade war fears intensify
The looming trade war continues to wreak havoc in stock markets worldwide. The AEX in Amsterdam opened with a loss of 4 percent on Monday morning, compared to closing on Friday. The markets continued to fall, hitting -7 percent shortly after opening at 9:00 a.m. The sell-off began last week after U.S. President Donald Trump announced blunt, wide-ranging tariffs on imported goods from most of its trading partners, a decision which was met days later by a retaliatory tax from China.
At 9:39 a.m., the AEX stood at 788.41, down 52.88 since Friday’s close. Almost all funds on the AEX opened in the red. The heaviest losses so far were to Aegon (-8.24% to 4,867 euros), Randstad (-7.88% to 32.64 euros, and ING (7.65% to 14,722 euros).
The Dutch technology companies also sustained heavy losses. Philips was down 7.01 percent to 19.35, ASM International was down 7.04 percent to 345.90 euros, BE Semiconductor dropped 6.57 percent to 83.00 euros, ASML dropped 7.00 percent to 524.60 euros, and DSM was down 5.25 percent to 84.44 euros
The funds were dropping so quickly, it was hard to keep up.
The French CAC opened with a 7 percent loss, the BEL20 in Belgium opened 5 percent in the red, according to RTL Nieuws. The losses are expected to increase. Many main funds have not opened trading yet due to the expected significant price drops.
The markets were even more negative in Asia. The Hong Kong stock market (HKEX) plummeted by as much as 12.5 percent, according to ANP. The Shanghai stock market (SSEC) fell by 8 percent, and the Nikkei in Tokyo was down over 6 percent shortly before the stock market closed. In Taiwan (TWSE), the stock market lost almost 10 percent.
The stock markets in India (NSE) and Australia (ASX) both lost around 4 percent.
On Wednesday, Trump introduced his latest gambit in trade policy, introducing the tariffs he bluntly proposed during his 2024 re-election campaign. The tariffs were without nuance, drawing criticism from economists and policy makers including DNB President Klaas Knot, the head of the Dutch central bank.
“This has nothing to do with economic theory. If it weren’t so serious, I’d call it laughable,” Knot said on Nieuwsuur a day after Trump’s announcement.
China reacted on Friday, pushing its own 34 percent tax on goods imported from America, sending the already slumping markets deeper into the red. The AEX Index closed on Friday at its lowest point in 14 months after two straight trading days of heavy losses.
There was also speculation that the Trump economic policy of tariffs was hastily calculated, with some researchers finding artificial intelligence content generators creating similar tariff proposals based strictly on trade deficits. The blanket tariffs the U.S. government began imposing on Saturday were based on trade deficit percentages with a range of countries, territories, and regions, with the relevant tariff often equating to half of that rate.
“Trump’s philosophy is that any trade surplus is wrong, but there is no economist who thinks so,” Knot said last week. “Countries are at different stages of development, and some stages involve a trade surplus or a trade deficit. There is nothing wrong with that in itself.”
