Shoppers stroll in downtown Shanghai on Monday beneath a giant screen displaying market data. Stock prices on the city’s main SSE Composite Index dropped sharply during the day, in step with the Hong Kong and Taiwan markets, as fears over U.S. President Donald Trump’s impending tariffs reached fever pitch. Photo by Alex Plavevski/EPA-EFE

Over in Frankfurt, Germany’s main Xetra DAX index was down more than 1,350 points, around 6.6%, while France’s CAC 40 was off by 6% and the wider Stoxx 50, the eurozone’s blue-chip index, was down 6.2%, losing more than 300 points.

The falls in Europe followed a Monday session in Asia that saw shares in freefall, particularly in Greater China and Singapore, where markets had been closed since Thursday due to a public holiday and the weekend.

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s Hang Seng Index ended down more than 3,000 points, shaving more than 13% off its value, Taiwan’s TAIEX index in Taipei dropped by 9.7%, its largest ever intraday loss, shedding more than 2,000 points, China’s main Shanghai Composite Index plunged 3,097 points, ending the day down 7.43%, while Singapore’s Straights Times Index went on a roller coaster ride before closing out the session down 7.46%.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index nose-dived for a third straight day shedding nearly 8% of its value, freefalling for the first 30 minutes after the start of trade at 9 a.m. local time in Tokyo before stabilizing to end at 31,136.58 points. Korea’s main KOSPI index lost 5.57% with prices of shares of around 70% of the 200 firms that make up the index ending the day in the red.

Ahead of new tariffs as high as 49% coming into effect Wednesday, U.S. billionaire investor Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Holdings, warned Trump was declaring “global economic war,” urging him to call a “90-day time out” to allow time to resolve the trade imbalances he wanted addressed.

“Other nations have taken advantage of the U.S. by protecting their home industries at the expense of millions of our jobs and economic growth in our country. But, by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital,” Ackman wrote in a post on X.

“The president has an opportunity to call a 90-day time out, negotiate and resolve unfair asymmetric tariff deals, and induce trillions of dollars of new investment in our country. If, on the other hand, on April 9 we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocketbooks, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.”

Following massive back-to-back losses across the three major U.S. indices on Thursday and Friday, futures trading ahead of Monday’s open showed U.S.-listed firms were in for another tumultuous session with futures on the Dow, S&P 500 and NASDAQ down 1.9%, 1.7% and 2% as investors desert the market in favor of “safe” investments.

However, Trump remained adamant he would not be swayed by the turmoil on the markets, telling reporters on Air Force One en route back to Washington late Sunday that while he didn’t want “anything to go down, sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”