Wall Street's fear index soared Thursday as investors were shocked by Trump's historic tariff hikes. When U.S. stocks and blue-chip stocks such as Apple plummeted, the VIX volatility index, also known as the "fear indicator", soared 30%, towards its biggest single-day gain since the Fed-driven sell-off in December. “The market thinks it’s not just a bad economy, it’s a bad mathematics,” said Michael Brock, a market strategist at 37 Capital. Brock noted that the Trump administration's way of calculating reciprocal tariffs seems suspicious. "They ignore every rule of classic micro and macroeconomics. This is the equivalent of a suicide bomb policy formulation." Leeds Ann Sanders, chief investment strategist at Schwab Finance, said that many investors in the past believed that Trump was just using tariffs as a negotiation tool. "Now the market is saying, wait, that's really happening. We should believe his words," Sanders said. "Yesterday, we were not liberated from uncertainty," she refers to what Trump calls "liberation day."