Klarna, StubHub and Medline have put on hold their initial public offerings. Jaguar Land Rover has paused all car shipments to the United States. Nintendo has delayed taking preorders for its new game console, the Switch 2, to assess the effect of tariffs on prices.

President Donald Trump is freezing the U.S. economy, intentionally or not, and the damage worsens with every day he stays his course. His 10 percent across-the-board tariffs went into effect Saturday, and the next round of higher levies for individual countries is set to snap into place Wednesday. Without congressional approval ( something the Constitution requires ), Trump is imposing the highest U.S. taxes on trade since 1909 — effectively the largest U.S. tax increase since 1968.

On Wall Street, traders are more frightened than they have been since the 2008 financial crisis. In Europe, analysts flash back to the aftershocks of Brexit in 2016. In Asia, this feels like the 1997 financial crisis all over again. What happens in the next few days will decide how deep a now-seemingly-inevitable recession will become in the U.S. and beyond.

It remains unknown how most other countries will retaliate and whether the White House will negotiate deals to lessen the fallout. As markets fell on Monday, Trump threatened additional 50 percent tariffs on China, while Taiwan and three other countries offered to end all their tariffs on the United States. (Peter Navarro, the president’s trade adviser, said this will not be enough.) Every country has its own domestic considerations when gauging how to react.

Meanwhile, businesses will stall big investment decisions until they have an idea of where tariffs will be in the days, weeks and months ahead. Junk bonds have had their biggest sell-off since the covid crisis of 2020. Small businesses, unable to absorb cost increases or push for price concessions from suppliers, might start to default. And the tariffs threaten to disrupt complex supply chains, leading to potential shortages.

In a frozen economy, companies feel compelled to lay off workers, because this is the cost they can most easily control. Unemployment stands to rise.

Joblessness will, in turn, weaken consumer confidence. Like companies, households, whose spending accounts for 70 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, hunger for clarity as they contemplate purchasing decisions. Booking an expensive summer vacation right now would take bravery — or a big bank account. Many families will be inclined to postpone. Over the past weekend, many people stockpiled wine, shampoo and other imported goods before the tariffs hit.

Panic like this easily becomes self-fulfilling. Stagflation — inflation and unemployment without growth — seems a distinct possibility. Selling equities as markets tank is historically a bad idea, but buying stocks right now is like trying to catch a falling knife. Market vitality also shapes short-term economic behavior: People spend more when they feel richer, and less when they feel poorer. And, of course, once prices go up, they rarely come down.

Many variables could modulate today’s tariff shock. It would help, for instance, if the courts would step in to temporarily block Trump from abusing his emergency authorities in order to impose tariffs — as a promising test lawsuit in Florida is requesting. It would also help if Republicans on Capitol Hill would pass legislation to stay Trump’s hand.

The U.S. economy proved resilient through the pandemic, but this was in part because the government injected trillions of dollars in liquidity via fiscal and monetary policy. This time, such a rescue seems unlikely. The Federal Reserve finds itself in a pickle, balancing dual mandates to fight both inflation and unemployment. Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said Friday that it will be difficult to assess what to do with interest rates until there’s more certainty about how much will be subject to tariffs, at what levels and for how long. And then there’s the question of how much the pain might be made worse if, in the next few months, Congress extends — or possibly expands — the 2017 tax cuts.

Mixed messaging from White House surrogates has only confused matters. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said tariffs have maximized Trump’s leverage, but he added: “It’s not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said more than 50 countries “are burning the phone lines into the White House,” in some cases “desperate” to cut a deal with Trump. But Navarro insists this is not a negotiation.

Their messaging is mixed up because their strategy is unclear — no one, not even Trump, seems to know the endgame. Is it to maintain high tariffs to bring in revenue, or is it to force negotiations to lower tariffs on U.S. goods and thus increase exports? The president’s answer so far has been: Yes.

And so the markets keep falling. Unless Trump de-escalates, the effects on the economy threaten to become catastrophic.