U.S. stock futures plunged Sunday evening, an indication that the market turmoil that began last week will continue when trading opens Monday, NBC News reported. As of Sunday evening, S&P 500 futures had fallen 4.8%. Futures in the tech-heavy Nasdaq also fell 5.3%, while futures for the Dow J ones Industrial Average declined 1,700 points in volatile trading. Future for the Russell 2000, which tracks the stocks of smaller companies, were off 5.7%. (Futures markets, which are a way for traders to move stocks when the major exchanges are closed, are an implied measure for how stocks will act when the markets do open, generally at 9:30 a.m. ET weekdays.) The situation was not better in other parts of the world. Stock futures in Japan were briefly halted after futures for the country’s Nikkei 225 and Topix indexes declined by more than 8%. Circuit breakers kick in on the Japanesese stock exchanges when the Nikkei or Topix move more than 8% in either direction. Even the price of bitcoin, which showed signs Friday of having resisted the wider market downturn, fell as much as 5%. The declines mean another savage day awaits investors when trading officially opens at 9:30 a.m. ET Monday. The losses would come on top of a two-day free-fall last week that was the worst 48-hour period in market history, with $6.6 trillion in value wiped out. Donald Trump 7 hours ago Trump portrait artist says career is in peril after president accuses her of distorting his likeness Autos 14 hours ago Jaguar and Land Rover maker pauses shipments to US as it develops post-tariff plans The main U.S. benchmark for crude oil fell 3.7%, to just under $60 per barrel, its lowest level since April 2021. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump signaled little intention to back off his proposal, under which tariffs would rise as much as 79% for countries like China. “THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH,” Trump wrote Saturday on Truth Social. “it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” On Sunday evening, he doubled down again, posting: “We have massive Financial Deficits with China, the European Union, and many others. The only way this problem can be cured is with TARIFFS, which are now bringing Tens of Billions of Dollars into the U.S.A. They are already in effect, and a beautiful thing to behold. The Surplus with these Countries has grown during the “Presidency” of Sleepy Joe Biden. We are going to reverse it, and reverse it QUICKLY. Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!” Asked about the markets plunge late Sunday aboard Air Force One, Trump said it was sometimes necessary to “take medicine,” and that no deal would come with China unless the U.S.’s trade deficit with it was addressed. He also said he was not purposely engineering a market sell-off — an assertion that contradicts a TikTok Trump posted and then re-posted over the weekend. In a release just before futures trading began Sunday, the White House published a brief note that recognized administration officials for outlining Trump’s plan to end “the globalist policies of economic destruction that have shipped American jobs and industries overseas at the expense of American workers.” The baseline 10% tariffs took effect Saturday, with dozens of countries facing higher so-called reciprocal tariffs beginning Wednesday. China said Friday it would impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the United States beginning this Thursday, the day the U.S. tariffs are set to rise on Chinese goods — from 20% to at least 54%. Goldman Sachs analysts wrote over the weekend that the “tariff pandora’s box has been opened,” adding that the U.S. action against China in particular was “substantially higher than our economists’ previous base case and most investors had expected.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News in an interview Sunday morning that the White House was not considering extending the start date for the tariffs. “There is no postponing. They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks,” Lutnick said. “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America and be automated,” he said. “The tradecraft of America — workers are going to fix” the robots. While Trump’s Cabinet has been aligned behind him, the overwhelming consensus among economists and high-profile business executives has been that the tariffs are a mistake. One surprising source of criticism was Elon Musk, who hit out Saturday at the White House senior adviser for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro. Navarro shot back in an interview Sunday that Musk was “simply protecting his own interests.” But it’s not clear that Musk’s interests are particularly different from those of any of the many businesses that rely on the modern global economic system and its cross-border supply chains. Tesla, alongside SpaceX, last month submitted a letter warning the U.S. trade representative of the impact of tariffs and the threat of retaliatory ones to its bottom line. Ahead of the futures open Sunday evening, Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities financial group, cut his price forecasts for Tesla’s stock by 43% and for Apple’s by 23%. “The economic pain that will be brought by these tariffs are hard to describe and can essentially take the U.S. tech industry back a decade in the process while China steamrolls ahead,” he wrote. He added that the tariffs as currently constituted would unleash “economic Armageddon and stop the U.S. tech world in its tracks.” There were other signs of the gravity of the situation. Stan Druckenmiller, one of the most successful Wall Street investors in history, published a post on X for only the fifth time to correct another poster’s summary of an interview he gave. “I do not support tariffs exceeding 10% which I made abundantly clear in the interview you cite,” he wrote. The massive market downdrifts are in response not to the imposition of tariffs — which have been enacted by most presidential administrations — but rather to the scale of what Trump has proposed. Rather than simply tax imports into the United States, Trump seeks to upend an entire economic order that was premised on global trade and cooperation, with the United States transitioning to a service-oriented economy and away from having to rely on labor-intensive manufacturing. The cost of transitioning back to the kind of export-oriented economy Trump proposes is virtually incalculable, since it would also entail a relatively lower standard of living for a majority of people in the United States for an indefinite period of time. In the meantime, at least one Wall Street firm is already forecasting that unemployment is poised to climb from 4.2% to 5.3% and for the economy to contract. “The pinch from higher prices that we expect in coming months may hit harder than in the post-pandemic inflation spike” because average income growth has been slowing, analysts with JPMorgan wrote in a note to clients late Friday. They said they expect a significant pull-back in consumer spending — which drives 80% of the U.S. economy — as a result of the economic uncertainty. Hedge fund investor Bill Ackman, an ardent supporter of Trump’s 2024 campaign, posted a lengthy note on X warning of the consequences to the economy should Trump fail to back off. “The President has an opportunity on Monday to call a time out and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system,” he wrote. Alternatively, “we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down. May cooler heads prevail.” This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here: SNL’ jokes that Trump’s tariffs will ‘Make America Great Depression Again’ Comedian and actor Russell Brand charged with rape and sexual assault Tom Cruise pays tribute to Val Kilmer with a moment of silence at CinemaCon ...read more read less