When the stock market goes down as it has the past couple of days, the usual reasons given are something like Trump Tariffs, but it's more complex than that, as one Houston economics professor will tell you.
"Financial people don't like volatility, and the Trump administration is in a hurry to do a lot of things that they think should have been done over a long time, so we're getting a lot of stuff in a fast time, and that's lots of changes over a short time," University of Houston professor Dr. Steven G. Craig says.
Economies around the world have gotten used to what some people call Free Trade, while others might call it Easy Trade, meaning the fewer barriers to the markets the better, and tariffs can be barriers.
This has some investor worried about the price of goods after the tariffs kick in, and Dr. Craig says it's not just for a short time thereafter, it's for months thereafter and -- depending on how long the tariffs are in place -- years.
And the effects may be felt in nation after nation, "when we buy a good that has more than one part...it's hard to say how many countries are involved in that product," he says.
Investors are concerned that President Donald Trump may be trying to do too much at once, but it's hard to tell just yet whether the timing is good.
"From a political perspective, for Trump to do it at the beginning of his term, maybe two years from now we'll just say, oh, it turns out he was a genius in disguise, and we just didn't recognize it."