'Volatility': Financial expert says Trump keeping businesses from making crucial 'decisions'

The end of April 2025 brought a lot of troubling economic news, from the U.S. Commerce Department reporting that the United States' gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 0.3 percent during the first three months of the year to the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, California expecting shipping volume to drop by as much as 35 percent in May.

CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin discussed the state of the U.S. economy during a Thursday morning, May 1 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," warning that the "volatility" and "uncertainty" being created by President Donald Trump is an ongoing worry for businesses.

Sorkin told host Mika Brzezinski, "Look, there's no question the volatility is going to continue. We've been saying this now for months: As long as there are not tariff deals or at least explicit senses of what is going to happen next, the business environment is going to be unusually volatile because people aren't going to be knowing what they're supposed to do. Can they make investments? Can they not make investments? How much are their goods going to cost? All of these things persist."

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Sorkin, who hosts "Squawk Box" on CNBC, emphasized that Trump is doing nothing to calm the anxieties of businesses and Wall Street.

Sorkin told Brzezinski, "It would have been one thing if the president had come out at the beginning of the year and said, 'I'm going to implement a tariff program, and I'm going to implement 10 percent tariffs, but I'm going to do it gradually. And this is going to happen over a two-year period. And in six months from now, we're going to have a 3 percent tariff rate. And in a year from now, we're going to have 6 percent tariff rate'…. If you had done something like that, where you had laid it out exactly as it was going to be, it was not going to be a grand negotiation with all of these countries. And you actually would explicitly say, 'This is what we want.' I'm not sure it's what we want, but if that was the plan, you wouldn't have had all of this uncertainty."

Sorkin continued, "People could have actually made decisions."

The "Squawk Box" host also pointed out that because of Trump's tariffs, "people are rushing to import things."

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"So it's already distorting the economy because they're trying to bring stuff in early to get in under these tariff deadlines," Sorkin told Brzezinski. "And then, they're having to store it. So that's a separate cost."

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