'Turned the lights out': Maddow explains how close stock market came to going 'off a cliff'

Financial markets have been taking a nosedive since President Donald Trump announced double-digit tariffs on every country and territory in the world this week. But on Friday, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) almost got so calamitous that an emergency measure nearly kicked in.

During her monologue on Friday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow showed two metrics that illustrated how volatile the stock market became on the second day of post-tariff chaos. She explained that the NYSE's "trading curbs" — which she characterized as "circuit breakers" were nearly activated due to the rapid decline in the S&P 500 Index.

"The markets have circuit breakers that kick in when things go off a cliff," Maddow explained. "They're these shut-offs that kick in automatically and basically stop the market. They stop people from trading for 15 minutes when things have gone unbelievably wrong. And where those circuit breakers kick in — like the threshold of how bad it has to be before the circuit breakers kick in, is when the S&P drops 7% from the previous day's close."

READ MORE: Federal judge reveals 'undisputed evidence' Trump is deliberately sabotaging blue states

"Today, the S&P dropped 6%. Had we got to seven, we would have hit the circuit breaker," she continued. "They would have turned the lights out on the market to try to save us from ourselves. That's one way to understand the severity of what's happened here."

Maddow also illustrated the precipitous nature of the stock market by referencing Friday's spike in the VIX volatility index, which is run by the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The MSNBC host described VIX as a ticker in which a sharp increase can often precede a major financial disaster. She showed a graph that with three distinct jumps — one at the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, one as the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the global economy and one that is now jumping in response to the panic triggered by Trump's tariffs.

"That [spike] not caused by the biggest financial catastrophe since the great depression or a global pandemic that's killing millions of people, that one caused simply by Donald Trump being president. Again. With his great ideas," she said.

Watch the clip below, or by clicking this link.

READ MORE: 'Mistake': Experts say Trump's 'lying about business deals' is a 'national security risk'