Friday's late afternoon trade: Trump tweetstorm sinks Wall Street as trade war rages on

Wall Street plunged in a broad sell-off on Friday as China and the United States traded their latest salvos in a prolonged trade war, spooking investors and erasing slight gains following a generally positive speech by US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. All three major US stock indexes turned sharply lower, setting a course for their fourth consecutive weekly declines after President Donald Trump tweeted that US companies should "immediately start looking for an alternative to China."
Trump pressed American companies to leave China in response to an earlier announcement from Beijing that it would impose a new round of retaliatory tariffs on an additional $75 billion in US goods, upping the ante in an acrimonious trade war that has roiled markets for months and shown little sign of abating. "It is mind-boggling," said Ken Polcari, managing principal at Butcher Joseph Asset Management in New York. "On one day (Trump) tells you everything is going great with China and today he is saying everyone get out of China."
Earlier in the session, US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, speaking the Fed's annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, reiterated that the central bank would "act as appropriate" to keep the current economic expansion afloat, but otherwise gave few clues as to whether an interest rate cut was in the cards at next month's policy meeting.
President Trump's tweeted response to the speech labelled Powell an "enemy." Yields for 2-year and 10-year US Treasuries entered inversion territory, a classic recessionary red flag. The curve has traded in and out of inversion for the past three days. The CBOE Volatility index, a gauge of market anxiety, jumped 3.85 points to 20.49, its highest reading in a week.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 489.79 points, or 1.87%, to 25,762.45, the S&P 500 lost 58.52 points, or 2.00%, to 2,864.43 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 201.95 points, or 2.53%, to 7,789.44. All 11 major sectors in the S&P 500 were in negative territory, with tech, energy, consumer discretionary, industrials and communications services all down 2% or more. Shares of Apple Inc, which has significant exposure to the Chinese market, sank 4.5%.