Trump Tariff Chaos Comes for Earnings, Leaves Wall Street Flying Blind

Mari Shor was deep into a firm-wide presentation on what President Donald Trump’s tariffs meant for the dozens of consumer companies she analyzes at Columbia Threadneedle when someone interrupted her. Mari, the tariffs are paused, the colleague said, the stocks you cover are soaring.

For days, Shor had been scrambling to tweak her profit models to incorporate the steep tariffs Trump unveiled last week and now those new estimates looked, for the moment at least, irrelevant. A day later, as stocks began to sink anew, Shor marveled at the blinding confusion created by all the twists and turns in Trump’s trade war.