Like it or not, the bond market rules all

President Trump unveiled his grand tariff strategy in the late afternoon on April 2, probably expecting the stock market to hate the plan. And it did. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 597 points, or 10.5%, over the next two days. 

To put the debacle into perspective, the S&P 500's beatdown was its biggest two-day point loss since the end of 2007, bigger even than the 2-day loss the index suffered as the Covid-19 pandemic erupted in 2020.