US stocks fell sharply on Thursday as President Donald Trump imposed sweeping trade tariffs, with analysts suggesting the White House administration is seeking to slow the economy to curb inflation and ease the debt burden.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted that the decline was mostly due to the decline of the “Magnificent Seven” — which includes Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN ), Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA ), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ), Meta (NASDAQ: META ), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA ) and others — rather than Trump’s trade measures. He said the Nasdaq’s all-time high coincided with Chinese AI firm Deepseek launching advanced language models, raising concerns about the competitiveness of U.S. tech companies.

Wall Street Indices as of 11:00 AM ET April 3, 2025

Observers speculate that Trump's inner circle is deliberately engineering a downturn to facilitate the restructuring of the country's massive debt obligations. The strategy has already wiped more than a trillion dollars off the value of U.S. stocks and pushed investors into safe-haven assets such as gold , which has reached new highs.

Total value of the crypto economy as of 11:00 AM ET April 3, 2025.

Does everyone who says we have a "great economy" realize we have $37 trillion in debt and it costs over $1 trillion to service it? - this is the question entrepreneur Jacob Canfield asked his subscribers.

The only way out is to refinance our debt at lower interest rates. And the only way to get lower rates? Crash the market. Put pressure on the Fed. Force them to lower rates. When rates go down, the US can roll over debt cheaper. When you get cheap debt, everything goes up.

Cryptocurrencies have also suffered big losses. Canfield doesn’t see this as a big problem, writing that “in the short term, we’ll see a crash in real estate, stocks, and cryptocurrencies, and a boom in gold and precious metals. In the long term, new all-time highs across the board.”