In the last hour, stock markets have opened in Europe.

The DAX in Frankfurt is down more than 6.5% currently.

The FTSE 100 down around 5% and the index in Paris down nearly 6% in early trading.

President Trump's tariffs are continuing to send shockwaves and fuel fears of a recession.

Now, stock markets across Asia have seen an absolute sea of red at one point in early trading.

The main market in Japan, the Nikkei, was down by nearly 9%.

The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong is currently down more than 13% and the markets in South Korea and Taiwan have also fallen sharply into negative territory.

In China, investors have warned people to brace themselves for what they're calling Ugly Monday.

President Trump, for now, is ignoring the turmoil on the stock market.

Speaking on Air Force One, he said, sometimes you have to take medicine to fix the problem.

He insisted that jobs and investments were returning to the US.

What's going to happen with the market, I can't tell you, but I can tell you our country has gotten a lot stronger and eventually it will be a country like no other.

It will be the most dominant country economically in the world, which is what it should be.

Is there a Trump put, though?

Is there pain in the market at some point?

You're unwilling to tolerate this idea of a Trump put.

Is there a threshold?

I think your question is so stupid.

I don't want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.

And we have such a horrible...

We have been treated so badly by other countries because we had stupid leadership that allowed this to happen.

Marika Oyanar, Asia Business Hub, has the latest from there.

It has been described by some analysts as even a financial bloodbath, as all we've been seeing all day was a sea of red arrows pointing downwards.

As you said, Japan's Nikkei has finished trading for the day down 7%, and it goes to show how this is a deeper sell-off than what we saw on Thursday and Friday, and that's because investors are growing increasingly concerned about the escalating global trade war and also the impact on the global economy because, of course, it was on Friday evening, our time, Asia time, when Beijing retaliated with that 34% tariffs on all American products entering China, which really escalated that fear of global trade war.

In terms of the impact on the global economy, I think we've been hearing from a lot of economists talking about these tariffs pushing up prices in the United States and pushing the US economy into a recession, but some are even worried that the global economy could fall into a recession as well.

And, of course, the impact on the global supply chain, as we've been talking about it, that's something that they're worried about too.

Mariko Oi there.

Let's talk to our business presenter, Sally Bondock.

Sally, just give us an overview how bad things are.

Pretty bad, as you were hearing from Mariko there.

And, I mean, you outlined just how dramatic the open has been in Europe this morning.

It's not overstating it to say it's carnage or a bloodbath or any of those adjectives to describe how today is progressing.

And, actually, the bookies or the futures markets are predicting we'll see a dramatic decline again today on Wall Street.

And what's kind of fed into this is, of course, Trump's tariffs.

That's the reason for the massive sell-off.

I think his defiance that we saw there on Air Force One as he was setting off or landing or whichever way he was going is really being read in markets as he's staying put, he's hanging tough, whatever phrases he's using.

He's not reacting to markets.

Therefore, many investors now are pricing in this could be a long, hard battle.

And the impact that will have on economies around the world, the global economy is not going to be good.

And, actually, some are pricing in recession.

Goldman Sachs today increased the chances of a US recession to 45% this year.

So everyone is readjusting all their outlook now and they're pricing in bad stuff, basically.

When we hear about share prices tumbling, how does that translate into an economic recession, real-life effects that people will feel?

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, when it comes to how we might feel the impact right now, I mean, for people who are trading markets on a daily basis, they're speculators.

There's lots of people who do that at home.

They're sitting in front of a terminal and they're trying to make money.

For them, it's really tough because they're either going to lose a lot or they might win a lot depending on how good they are.

For those of us who have pensions, so I'm not trading shares on a daily basis, but I do have a pension that I will one day be making use of.

That's been hit today.

So most pensions globally will have gone down in terms of their paper value.

But, of course, the good news about that is I'm not retiring anytime soon.

And so, therefore, by the time I do retire, the hope is that markets will have recovered significantly.

And that's why those who manage people's money, personal finance investors, investment advisors, always say you invest for the long term.

And by that you mean a long time, one year, five years, ten years or more.

Because there are lots of volatility on stock markets.

And in my career, I've seen massive sell-offs.

Previously, when the 2008 financial crisis happened, when the global pandemic happened, markets fell off a cliff.

But they come back again.

And that's the point.

Yeah, they sure do.

Sally, we're just looking at pictures from Luxembourg because EU ministers responsible for trade are arriving there currently.

They're going to talk to the media, we think, about how the European Union should best respond to this series of tariffs, as well as a decision on EU relations with China.

But that is a problem for so many countries to decide what to do now, whether to retaliate or not to, and hope that perhaps you can negotiate something better.

And time is of the essence because we saw the blanket 10% tariffs come in over the weekend.

But those more specific retaliatory tariffs on the part of the US begin on Wednesday.

So between now and Wednesday, the European Union, European Commission have got the chance to negotiate with President Trump because, of course, he said he called Europe one of the worst offenders.

They're on the bad list.

And the tariffs on all European goods is sitting at 20%, which is huge for some industries like the champagne industry, the wine sector, cosmetics, cars is 25%.

And actually, if you look on the stock markets today and you look at some of the biggest losers, it's VW, it's Mercedes, Peugeot, Citroen, those kind of companies.

So for the trade ministers meeting now in Luxembourg, they're going to be talking about that.

What is the best course of action?

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, has been very forthright, very strong, talking about a united front in Europe and how we will come back with our tariffs as well.

She talked about €26 billion worth of tariffs on American goods coming into Europe, which will hit US hard.

But that's not been confirmed yet because, of course, they want to negotiate.

They want to try and get a deal before Wednesday.

How great is this secondary fear that these tariffs will end up with cheaper goods going elsewhere, being dumped on other countries that don't have tariffs?

Absolutely.

It's a huge fear because China, for example, if we just give an example of that, BYD, massive electric vehicle maker in China, they're cheap.

They can make them really cheaply in China and then export them all over the world.

And that's one of the things that President Trump is not happy about whatsoever.

So if far fewer BYD cars are being sold in the United States, well, where are they all going to go?

They might end up here in Europe.

I mean, of course, we've put tariffs on Chinese cars actually anyway here in Europe.

But the point is with steel, with other products that are being heavily tariffed going into the States, if they're channeled elsewhere, then it could end up here in the UK, dumped on our markets or on European markets or other markets, and then it makes it really difficult to compete with that, like British steel, for example.

So that's a real issue, and that's something that the prime minister has implied.

We're waiting to hear.

He's going to deliver a speech later today about ways that the UK government can try and cushion the blow for UK industry.

But it's expected there'll be some sort of discussion about anti-dumping measures, measures put in place to stop that from happening.

Sally, you've been speaking to a lot of different analysts over the last few hours.

The consensus on tariffs per se, they're not always a bad thing, but the consensus really about what's happened this time is that it is such a blanket application of tariffs.

Yeah.

I think the difference is, something that President Trump has said quite a few times is he refers back to the 1930s or whatever, when this was massively introduced on a huge level before, seen as a big protectionist policy that led to economic growth in the US eventually.

The difference, though, then compared to now is the globalisation of industry, of business, of commerce in the recent decades, because, of course, it's all been about world trade, it's all been about where is it most efficient to do things and make things and produce things, and then we just ship it all over the world and sell it.

And, you know, protectionism was at a minimum.

And because everything has changed, it means that now that you implement tariffs, it's not going to have the same impact as it did back in the 1930s.

And the consequences of implementing tariffs to such a great degree across the world is huge, and we're seeing the markets playing out the fear factor of what the impact could be on the global economy, because you can't just unravel supply chains that are global and all the various aspects of business and commerce that have been crossing borders very easily for decades.

And you're not going to suddenly be able to build a factory in America and make goods and sell them in America with American workers.

It's not going to happen quickly, and that's the worry.

So for US citizens, for many of us around the world, we'll really see the prices going up because things will become more expensive.

And as much as businesses will try and take on board the costs and not pass it on, I think in many cases they'll be forced.

They'll have to pass it on to the consumer.

Sally, thank you very much.

Well, let's speak to Yael Selfin, who's vice-chair and chief economist at KPMG in the UK.

Yael, thank you very much for talking to us.

What are you making of all these red arrows pointing downwards across the markets?

It is a worry, at least a short-term worry, because essentially what it tells us is that business confidence is very low, and that will have implications on business investment.

It will have implications on the way consumers decide to spend their money.

So beyond the impact of the actual tariffs, we're seeing additional effects from these falls in the stock market.

There are many, many calls going into the White House from global leaders wanting to do a deal, hoping that in some way they will find their country's way out of these tariffs.

How many hopes are being pinned on the results of those calls, do you think?

Well, it doesn't seem that likely that we will have a change in tariffs.

What the hope is that you won't see an escalation and many more retaliatory measures in the coming days and weeks, because that will make the impact on the global economy even worse, especially on the countries that are going to put on these additional tariffs.

And, Yael, we talked about this so much following the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

How does a crisis in the markets translate into a real-life economic crisis that people feel?

Well, if you've got markets that seize up, it means that there's less liquidity and it means that companies can borrow less money, people can borrow less money, or it is more expensive to borrow money and then invest it or spend it.

So that is a big worry.

Hopefully we're not there and things will calm down.

So I think that we're a little bit far from that yet, hopefully.

Right.

So if you're a company whose share price is tanking, that will potentially result in an inability or a difficulty in securing loans, securing finance, and that's when people start to feel the outcome of what's going on in the markets?

Yeah, I mean, some of the companies that are affected are those that are going to find it harder to sell to the US market and those whose larger proportion of their products go to the US market.

So they will need to adjust, given that beyond the fact that the share price is going down.

Yael, I'm just looking at a figure that's just come in because Hong Kong stocks have ended 13.12% down.

That is the worst since the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Your reaction?

So it does seem that Asia is going to be affected particularly badly from these tariffs.

It's not the tariffs on China, it's tariffs on other economies.

These are economies that are fairly highly dependent on trade, on trade to the US and other Western economies.

So that is going to be very disruptive for these economies in particular.

So it's not surprising, if you like, to some degree, that you have a big correction there.

When you hear Donald Trump saying on Air Force One, as he did to reporters overnight, it's like taking medicine.

Sometimes you have to take the medicine.

What do you think of that?

Will this medicine work?

What's going to be the side effects of these medicines?

Well, I think tariffs on their own are not really a good way to try and readjust an economy and potentially, therefore, this is not necessarily the best route to take in terms of economic policy.

The US has a trade deficit for a reason, and it is a little bit complex to go through in one minute.

But essentially there's not necessarily a problem there as such, and there's other ways in which you could build a stronger economy with trade and without tariffs.

How long do you think this particular low point, a point where there is real sense of panic and uncertainty, how long do you think this will go on for?

It feels like the reaction is mainly a recognition that there's not going to be a quick fix.

Now that we've gone past that, the big issue is to try and understand where we are on tariffs and try and work through it.

So hopefully this is a matter of a week or so until we get more clarity.

It's the uncertainty that makes things worse at this stage.

Yael, thank you very much.

Yael Salfin, Chief Economist at KPMG here in the UK.