CNBC Business News Update - Market Open: Stocks Drop, Tariffs Are Official, Mortgage Rates Drop 3/4/25

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

From Wall Street to Main Street, the latest on the markets and what it means for your money. Updated regularly on weekdays, featuring CNBC expert analysis and sound from top business newsmakers. Anchored by CNBC's Jessica Ettinger.

I'm Jessica Edinger, CNBC. Stocks extending yesterday's sell-off this morning on Wall Street now that the Trump tariffs are in effect, retaliatory tariffs coming from Mexico, Canada and China. There's just vast confusion. No one knows. I mean, the automakers don't know what this is going to mean. The packaged goods companies don't know what it's going to mean when it comes from another country. There's no clarity whatsoever. Anyone who thinks that there's clarity is just completely wrong. It isn't like they've said, okay, look, here's the schedule, here's the tariff.

When you were in Europe and they did Brexit, you got the schedule, you got the tariff. You said, oh, okay, I owe this. They haven't given us anything. We don't know what we owe, what we don't owe. We don't know where it's paid. We don't know if it isn't paid. Do we owe them? Who owes it?

Does the buyer owe it? I mean, the lack of any thought about this is stunning. That's CNBC's Jim Cramer. The Dow down 400 points, 1% led lower by shares of Goldman Sachs down 3.5%. The S&P 500 index down 48 points, that's 8 tenths of a percent. The Nasdaq down 134 points, three quarters of a percent. Nvidia shares are flat this morning.

It does look like escalation. It really does look like we are firmly in art of the deal territory now. And it looks by some standards that this could be the beginning of an all out trade war between the U.S. and China and on a global scale. That's CNBC's Sri Jagarajah in Beijing. The CEO of Target says you, the consumer, will pay higher prices on certain things almost right away. Like fruits and vegetables, we depend on Mexico during the winter.

The consumer will likely see price increases over the next couple of days. Over the next couple of days? So those are really short supply chains. You think about all the fresh produce. You know, we're going to try to make sure we can do everything we can to protect pricing. But a 25% tariff, those prices will go up. For things like what? Strawberries, avocados, bananas.

What are we talking about? You've got that list right. Target CEO Brian Cornell with CNBC's Becky Quick. Target Meantime reported strong fourth quarter results, but its outlook is more cloudy and it says sales in February were soft, adding to worries about the health of the US consumer. Tariffs are gonna be a challenge across retail sector

and the most likely case is that terrorists are simply gonna be inflationary. That's UBS retail analyst Michael Lasser on CNBC. Best Buyout with better than expected quarterly results but says you can expect to feel pressure from inflation and higher prices in the months ahead. More than half of what Best Buy sells comes from either China or Mexico. Watch mortgage rates drop today. The yield on the 10-year Treasury hit its lowest since last October, and mortgage rates

loosely follow that 10-year. The average rate on a 30-year home loan, six and three-quarters percent, according to Mortgage News Daily. It was seven and a quarter just seven weeks ago, and it could drop this afternoon. The insurance industry is watching as another major storm is set to bring severe weather to millions of Americans. It's already started this morning with a half million people without power in Texas. The weather danger includes wildfire risk, sweeping from the plains to the Midwest into

the Great Lakes by tomorrow. The Carolinas are in a wildfire state of emergency again today. Tesla shares lower again today on sales, tanking in China. The company's lost about a third of its value in the first month that CEO Elon Musk has been at the White House. Jessica Ertinger, CNBC.