• US stocks are poised to continue their scorching free fall as futures signaled more fear over President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Administration officials on Sunday signaled that they won’t back down from their aggressive stance. Meanwhile, an inflation report is due later this week as well as bank earnings.

Wall Street remained in fear mode over President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Sunday evening as futures pointed to more steep losses.

Dow Jones Industrial Average futures tumbled 1,468 points, or 3.8%, while S&P 500 futures sank 4.3% and Nasdaq futures dived 4.9%. That follows a devastating week that saw the worst selloff since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 10-year Treasury yield was flat at 4%, and US crude oil prices fell 3.3% to $59.95 a barrel.

On Wednesday, Trump announced a minimum tariff rate of 10% and higher rates for 57 economies like China (34%), the European Union (20%), and Japan (24%). Fitch Ratings estimated that the effective tariff rate could hit 25% on average — the highest in more than 115 years.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers aired caution in an X post on Sunday, saying there’s a very good chance of more market turbulence similar to what was seen on Thursday and Friday.

Those sessions represented the fourth largest two-day drop in the last 85 years, Summer said. The selloff wiped out about $6 trillion in market cap.

“A drop of this magnitude signals that there’s likely to be trouble ahead, and people ought to be very cautious,” Summers wrote. 

Meanwhile, Trump administration on Sunday officials sought to ease concerns about financial markets and the economy.

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told ABC News that more than 50 countries have reached out to the White House to negotiate on tariffs.

But for now, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the tariffs will remain and won’t be postponed. While the minimum 10% tariff took effect early Saturday, the individualized levies will go into place Wednesday.

“They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks,” he told CBS.

In response to Trump’s sweeping tariffs, JPMorgan now sees a recession, with GDP shrinking 0.3% this year. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday there doesn’t have to be a recession and called the stock selloff a short-term reaction.

“One thing that I can tell you, as the Treasury secretary, what I’ve been very impressed with is the market infrastructure, that we had record volume on Friday. And everything is working very smoothly so the American people, they can take great comfort in that,” he told NBC.

Bessent also gave no indication that Trump will back off from this aggressive tariffs.

On Friday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned that sweeping tariffs could push inflation higher, cooling anticipation for an imminent interest rate cut. 

Markets will get an inflation update on Thursday, when the consumer price index report for March will come out, giving insight into where inflation was headed before the latest tariffs hit. 

Additionally, earnings season for first-quarter results will kick off this week as JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and BlackRock report on Friday.

Commentary from top executives about the tariffs and their forecasts for how they will affect their companies will be under special scrutiny.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• President Donald Trump’s tariffs could reach an effective rate as high as 30%, up from 25% under his recently announced plans, according to analysts at UBS. A rate that steep would mark the highest level in more than 150 years. But after a cycle of retaliation and escalation, UBS see tariffs coming back down later this year.

President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs are already sending rates to the steepest levels in a century, but they could go even higher.

According to a note from UBS analysts on Friday, the latest salvo of import taxes will send the effective rate to 25%, up from 2.5% before the 2024 election. But it’s not likely to stop there.

“We believe that the EU and China are likely to retaliate, and that the ‘reciprocal’ approach to US tariffs means that retaliation by trading partners is likely to be met with even higher US tariffs,” they wrote.

In addition, some of the imports that weren’t targeted this past week may be subject to future investigations and could lose their exemptions, UBS said, noting the Trump administration has a “high degree of conviction” in the merits of restrictive trade policies.

On Wednesday, Trump added a 34% levy on China that will take the total rate to 54% and hit the European Union with a 20% duty. China has already retaliated with its own 34% tariff, and the EU said it plans to respond too.

UBS expects the effective US tariff rate will peak in the 25%-30% range. According to data from Fitch Ratings, a 25% effective tariff rate would already be the highest since 1909.

And if it reaches 30%, it would be the highest since 1872—when Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant was president and the US economy was still in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.

But by the third quarter, UBS sees tariffs starting to head back down and expects the effective rate to end 2025 at 10%-15%.

“Various individual countries have suggested that they do not intend to retaliate and that deals with individual countries could begin to bring the overall effective tariff rate down,” analysts said.

In fact, Vietnam confirmed over the weekend that it offered to remove all tariffs on US imports, and Trump administration officials said Sunday that more than 50 countries have reached out to the White House for tariff talks.

Trump will also face more pressure to negotiate, UBS predicted, citing potential challenges to the legal basis for his tariffs and extensive business lobbying to water down policies or carve out exceptions.

And as midterm election season gets closer, political calculations may also soften Trump’s stance. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz warned of a political “bloodbath” in 2026 if tariffs cause a recession.

UBS sees US GDP expanding by less than 1% in 2025, including an intra-year recession that will see GDP decline 1% from peak to trough. Stocks will rebound, but analysts slashed their year-end S&P 500 target to 5,800 from 6,400.

“We believe some potentially acceptable ‘off-ramps’ that could enable all sides to declare victory could include some combination of higher European defense spending, measures in Asia to prevent dumping of excess supply into global markets, reductions in existing tariff or non-tariff barriers, or measures to increase inward investment into the US,” UBS said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. traveled to West Texas on Sunday after a second unvaccinated school-aged child died from a measles-related illness.

Ahead of a “Make America Healthy Again” tour across southwestern U.S., Kennedy said in a social media post that he was in Gaines County to comfort families who had to bury two young children who have died. Seminole is the epicenter of a measles outbreak that started in late January and continues to swell, with nearly 500 cases in Texas alone.

He said he was also working with Texas health officials to “control the measles outbreak.”

The child did not have underlying health conditions, and died Thursday from “what the child’s doctors described as measles pulmonary failure,” the Texas State Department of State Health Services said Sunday in a news release. Aaron Davis, a spokesperson for UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, said that the child was “receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized.”

This is the third known measles-related death tied to this outbreak. One was another school-aged child in Texas and the other was an adult in New Mexico. Neither were vaccinated.

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine advocate before ascending to the role of nation’s top health secretary earlier this year, has resisted urging widespread vaccinations as the measles outbreak has worsened under his watch.

“The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” Kennedy said in a lengthy statement posted on X. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine has been used safely for more than 60 years and is 97% effective against measles after two doses.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention teams have been “redeployed,” Kennedy added, although the nation’s public health agency never relayed it had pulled back during the growing crisis. Neither the CDC nor the state health department included the death in their measles reports issued Friday, but added it to their counts Sunday.

Nationwide, the U.S. has more than double the number of measles cases it saw in all of 2024.

More than two months in, the West Texas outbreak is believed to have spread to New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas, sickening nearly 570 people. The World Health Organization also reported cases related to Texas in Mexico. The number of cases in Texas shot up by 81 between March 28 and April 4, and 16 more people were hospitalized.

Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, a liver doctor whose vote helped cinch Kennedy’s confirmation, called Sunday for stronger messaging from health officials in a post on X.

“Everyone should be vaccinated! There is no treatment for measles. No benefit to getting measles,” he wrote. “Top health officials should say so unequivocally b/4 another child dies.”

A CDC spokesperson noted the efficacy of the measles vaccine Sunday but stopped short of calling on people to get it.

Departing from long-standing public health messaging around vaccination, the spokesperson called the decision a “personal one” and said people should talk to their doctor and “should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.”

Misinformation about how to prevent and treat measles is hindering a robust public health response, including claims about vitamin A supplements that have been pushed by Kennedy and holistic medicine supporters despite doctors’ warnings that it should be given under a physician’s orders and that too much can be dangerous.

Doctors at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, where the first measles death occurred, say they’ve treated fewer than 10 children for liver issues from vitamin A toxicity, which they found when running routine lab tests on undervaccinated children who have measles. Dr. Lara Johnson, chief medical officer, said the patients reported using vitamin A to treat and prevent the virus.

Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s former vaccine chief, said responsibility for the death rests with Kennedy and his staff. Marks was forced out of the FDA after disagreements with Kennedy over vaccine safety.

“This is the epitome of an absolute needless death,” Marks told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday. “These kids should get vaccinated — that’s how you prevent people from dying of measles.”

Marks also said he recently warned U.S. senators that more deaths would occur if the administration didn’t mount a more aggressive response to the outbreak. Kennedy has been called to testify before the Senate health committee on Thursday.

Experts and local health officials expect the outbreak to go on for several more months if not a year. In West Texas, the vast majority of cases are in unvaccinated people and children younger than 17.

With several states facing outbreaks of the vaccine-preventable disease — and declining childhood vaccination rates nationwide — some worry that measles may cost the U.S. its status as having eliminated the disease.

Measles is a respiratory virus that can survive in the air for up to two hours. Up to 9 out of 10 people who are susceptible will get the virus if exposed, according to the CDC. The first shot is recommended for children ages 12 to 15 months, and the second for ages 4 to 6 years.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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