Just after sunrise on Saturday, a satellite set its long-range camera on the city of Mandalay in Myanmar, not far from the epicenter of Friday’s 7.7 magnitude earthquake that devastated the Southeast Asian country’s second-largest city.

The mission was to capture images that, combined with artificial intelligence technology, could help relief organizations quickly assess how many buildings had collapsed or were heavily damaged and where helpers most needed to go.

At first, the high-tech computer vision approach wasn’t working.

“The biggest challenge in this particular case was the clouds,” said Microsoft’s chief data scientist, Juan Lavista Ferres. “There’s no way to see through clouds with this technology.”

The clouds eventually moved and it took a few more hours for another satellite from San Francisco-based Planet Labs to capture the aerial pictures and send them to Microsoft’s philanthropic AI for Good Lab. By then it was already about 11 p.m. Friday at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. A group of Microsoft workers was ready and waiting for the data.

The AI for Good lab has done this kind of AI-assisted damage assessment before, tracking Libya’s catastrophic flooding in 2023 or this year’s wildfires in Los Angeles. But rather than rely on a standard AI computer vision model that could run any visual data, they had to build a customized version specific to Mandalay.

“The Earth is too different, the natural disasters are too different and the imagery we get from satellites is just too different to work in every situation,” Lavista Ferres said. For instance, he said, while fires spread in fairly predictable ways, “an earthquake touches the whole city” and it can be harder to know in the immediate aftermath where help is needed.

Once the AI analysis was complete, it showed 515 buildings in Mandalay with 80% to 100% damage and another 1,524 with between 20% and 80% damage. That showed the widespread gravity of the disaster, but, just as important, it helps pinpoint specific locations of damage.

“This is critical information for teams on the ground,” Lavista Ferres said.

Microsoft cautioned that it “should serve as a preliminary guide and will require on-the-ground verification for a complete understanding.” But in the meantime, the tech company has shared the analysis with aid groups such as the Red Cross.

Planet Labs says its satellites — it has 15 of them orbiting the Earth — have now photographed roughly a dozen locations in Myanmar and Thailand since Friday’s quake.

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• President Donald Trump has changed his tune again on tariffs as investors nervously await a new batch of import taxes to be unveiled on Wednesday. The stock market has had an especially tough March, and a quiet period for earnings has meant bad news out of Washington looms even larger than normal.  

Stocks are set to post their worst quarter in nearly three years as markets wait in fear for President Donald Trump’s next big tariff announcement on Wednesday. The S&P 500 fell sharply after the opening bell, dipping below the 5,500 mark for the first time since September, before bouncing back to pare its losses. The index is down over 5% year to date, its worst three months since plunging 17% in the second quarter of 2022.

Wall Street has especially soured on tech as investors hunt for safer assets amid tariff turmoil. The Nasdaq Composite was down over 1% as of midday Monday and has fallen more than 11% in the first quarter of 2025. Shares of the market’s preeminent AI darling, Nvidia, have shed nearly a quarter of their value as the stock dipped Monday, while Elon Musk’s Tesla is down over 30% this year after its shares also fell. 

Markets had received a boost last week after Trump downplayed expectations for the tariff announcement on April 2, which he has termed “Liberation Day.” The tune from the administration has changed again, however, with the Wall Street Journal reporting over the weekend that a blanket 20% tariff on all imports is on the table. The White House has also pushed back on previous reports that so-called reciprocal tariffs on trading partners might be narrowed, with the president telling reporters Sunday the new taxes will target “all countries.”

Markets famously hate uncertainty, as the saying goes, and Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats have weighed on stocks for months. As Wednesday’s announcement looms, a lack of good news has also made things worse, said ETF and hedge-fund manager Jay Hatfield, CEO of Infrastructure Capital Advisors.

Core to Trump’s economic agenda, he said, is the idea that tariffs will pay for tax cuts elsewhere. While investors have been forced to contend with how higher taxes on imports could result in slower growth and higher prices, there haven’t been as many updates from Washington about reducing the tax burden for individuals or corporate America.

“The bad part is pretty certain,” Hatfield said, “but the good part is not certain.”

Stocks initially rallied to all-time highs after Trump’s election win in November thanks to the president’s promises of tax cuts and deregulation unleashing economic growth. 

“Not because he was going to try to make Canada the 51st state,” Hatfield said.

Seasonality could exacerbate recession fears

Those postelection gains have been more than erased after both the S&P and Nasdaq slid into correction territory in March. Tariff worries have fanned the flames of recession fears. Goldman Sachs now says there is a 35% chance of gross domestic product contracting for two straight quarters, in part because of how heavy import taxes could weigh on consumer spending and continued uncertainty might suppress business investment.

Cuts to the federal workforce, meanwhile, will also impact Friday’s monthly jobs report, and Hatfield would not be surprised if it came in soft. However, that could be bullish for the stock market long-term, he said, if it pushes the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.

He also noted bonds rallied Monday as investors piled into safe-haven assets. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, the benchmark for rates on mortgages and other borrowing costs throughout the economy, now sits at 4.23%, down about 60 basis points from early January.  

Finally, Hatfield also said March is typically a weak month for the stock market, in part owing to a lack of major earnings announcements to combat bad news.

“It’s kind of like waking up in the middle of night,” he said. “You don’t usually wake up euphoric. You wake up with your fears.”

Plenty of investors are hoping their tariff nightmare ends soon.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Over the weekend, Donald Trump’s reassurance of a more generous approach to tariffs was reversed again, apparently returning to draconian across-the-board 20% tariffs. The president’s imminent Rose Garden “Liberation Day” announcement of universal tariffs on everything coming into the U.S. from everyone—accompanied by the Trump-driven 10% decline in the stock market over the last month—is just the latest example of how Trump’s capricious tariff tantrums are steering the U.S. economy straight off the cliff. Given the near unanimous chorus of business leaders and economists, one must wonder what motivates Trump’s destructive decrees. As Trump himself confessed this weekend on NBC, “I couldn’t care less if car prices go up!” 

The problem is not tariffs—the problem is Donald Trump, plain and simple. Per our Yale CEO Caucus survey results, 90% of CEOs actually support tariffs, when they are used strategically and selectively. These business leaders support the use of selective tariffs to rectify genuine trade imbalances and constrain foreign dumping into the U.S., undermining U.S. producers in sectors such as steel.

But these worthy goals often seem to be subjugated to Trump’s personality-driven vendettas, such as punishing longtime nemesis Justin Trudeau; and even more importantly, Trump’s idiosyncratic, capricious rollout of tariffs has made it all but impossible for companies to invest at all, hampering Trump’s own stated goal of bringing investment and jobs back to the U.S.

Already, there is a confusing array of 12,500 tariff categories across 200 trading partners. We tallied up Trump’s tariff pronouncements over the last two months and found no less than a head-spinning 107 instances of paradoxical flip-flops on tariff policy, often with same-day reversals. That does not even account for often contradictory guidance from Trump’s deputies, which are then subsequently overruled by Trump himself.

Businesses need predictability and stability; no company can authorize billions in capital spending to build new plants or hire new workers when trade policy changes not day by day, not hour by hour, but in some cases, literally minute by minute. During our Yale CEO Caucus this month, CEOs groaned and cringed each time CNBC’s Eamon Javers read off a new tariff policy reversal, with seven flip-flops over our three-hour event.

Trump’s defenders argue this is all part of his “art of the deal”—to punch counterparties in the face so hard that they are knocked off balance and are all but begging for a deal. But the reality is, Trump is getting snookered in these deals, as companies merely repackage existing and preplanned capex spending into gauzy, headline-drawing “announcements” of “new investments” in the U.S. The veneer of glitz and glamour of fawning Oval Office press conferences announcing these new investments hides a much seamier reality, as much-ballyhooed new “investments” such as Foxconn’s planned $10 billion electronics factory in Wisconsin turn into abandoned shadows and idled plants. Meanwhile, foreign leaders and companies offer token concessions with little genuine benefit to the U.S., while racing to evade tariffs by rerouting supply chains through neutral countries, brazenly and openly defying Trump while paying lip service to his whims. That is why 90% of CEOs polled at our Yale CEO Caucus said that Trump’s tariffs are backfiring on the U.S.

These CEOs, like everyone else, are looking at ample data pointing to the widespread havoc wrought by Trump’s tariff tantrums. Not only have Trump’s botched tariff tantrums helped chop about $7 trillion in value off the stock market since his inauguration—enough to fund the government for an entire year—but the costs are being felt in the real economy. Far from bringing manufacturing and jobs back to the U.S., Trump is killing American manufacturing, hurting U.S. workers, and bringing the entire U.S. economy down with him. Inflation expectations have jumped to 32-year highs; consumer confidence has plunged 25% across both the University of Michigan and Conference Board surveys as consumer spending falls the most in five years; NFIB Small Business confidence has plunged 50%; the labor market is deteriorating as the number of new layoffs quadrupled over the last three months; capital spending and investments have come to a standstill; and GDP growth forecasts have come down by 1%—a head-spinning reversal of economic fortune as the initial euphoria of Trump’s pledges of tax cuts and deregulation morphed into the Frankenstein monster of all tariffs, all the time.

Of course, many business leaders wonder what motivates Trump’s destructive tariff tantrums. On one hand, Trump has obsessed over tariffs since at least the 1980s; and he has long, reductionistically viewed the U.S. balance of trade as if he were still running the Trump Organization, which tries to sell more than it buys every year. But the sheer, avoidable, intentional chaos of Trump’s tariff rollout, and his willingness to ignore significant stock market drawdowns, suggest there may be other explanatory factors. Some CEOs have privately suggested that Trump may be trying to induce a recession early in his term to “clear the deck” well before midterm elections—though that assumes a greater facility for long-term strategic foresight than is usually associated with Trump. More likely, perhaps Trump has no plan and is just making things up on the fly, with arbitrary megalomaniacal impulses unconstrained by yes-men staff. 

In Trump’s tantrums, psychoanalysts might find strong resemblance to what Sigmund Freud called the “death drive” pathology of entrepreneurs, or what psychiatrists term the self-destructive impulse—akin to a child on the beach who builds a beautiful castle and kicks it down.

Forty-two years ago, Abraham Zaleznik, a psychoanalyst management scholar at the Harvard Business School, explained that many times, such entrepreneurial leaders as Trump and Musk are driven by an ultimately self-destructive megalomania, rooted in a bad relationship with a parent who disparaged them but is no longer around to be proven wrong. Zaleznik stated, “In their climb to the top, they have certain fantasies having to do with creating a new world. There is a search for restitution—to remake the world, remake their childhood, remake a relationship with a parent. They fall prey to the Midas theory. Everything they touch will turn to gold, and if it doesn’t they go bonkers. I think if we want to understand the entrepreneur we should look at the juvenile delinquent. I think there are a lot of similarities. They both have an under-developed super-ego. And so they don’t understand right from wrong.”

Trump’s “Liberation Day” has turned into a nightmare for U.S. businesses. The real liberation the U.S. economy needs is a more orderly, strategic approach to tariffs, liberated from Trump’s idiosyncratic whims. 

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice and president and founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Steven Tian is the director of research at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Stephen Henriques is a senior research fellow at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute and a former McKinsey & Co. consultant. 

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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