Wall Street could be headed for a bear market. Here’s what that means

NEW YORK (news agencies) — Wall Street could soon be in the claws of another bear market as the Trump administration’s tariff blitz fuels fears that the added taxes on imported goods from around the world will sink the global economy.

The last bear market happened in 2022, but this decline feels more like the sudden, turbulent bear market of 2020, when the benchmark S&P 500 index tumbled 34% in a one-month period, the shortest bear market ever.

Here are some common questions about bear markets:

A bear market is a term used by Wall Street when an index such as the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen 20% or more from a recent high for a sustained period of time.

Why use a bear to refer to a market slump? Bears hibernate, so they represent a stock market that’s retreating. In contrast, Wall Street’s nickname for a surging market is a bull market, because bulls charge.

The S&P 500, Wall Street’s main barometer of health, closed 0.2% lower Monday after having been down by as much as 4.7%. It’s now 17.6% below the all-time high it set on Feb. 19.

The Dow industrials fell 0.9%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite, which already was in a bear market, bounced back from an early slide to eke out a 0.1% gain.