(Bloomberg) -- What had been a steady pullback from the US stock market accelerated sharply Monday as investors retreated from virtually every type of risk and economic fear raced across Wall Street.

Tech stocks tumbled by the most since 2022, sending the Nasdaq 100 Index diving nearly 4%. Crypto prices slid. Corporate bond sales were scrapped. Wall Street’s fear gauge and a key measure of credit risk surged. And Treasuries rallied, pulling yields down steeply, as they took on the role as haven of last resort.

Taken together, they all told the same story: Growing worry that President Donald Trump’s tariff hikes, spending cuts and geopolitical shakeups will stall what until recently has been an economy that defied naysayers with its strength.

The concerns intensified after Trump and his surrogates started warning there may be some near-term pain as he seeks to reorder the balance of world trade. Investors started preparing for that en masse.

“The trading today felt like an absolute death spiral,” said Alon Rosin, Oppenheimer & Co.’s head of institutional equity derivatives.

The movements show the remarkable shift in sentiment less than two months into Trump’s presidency, which was once welcomed on Wall Street. The initial betting was that his tax-cut and deregulatory plans would spur the market forward by pouring stimulus onto an already solidly expanding economy.

But that’s been swiftly undercut in recent weeks as the chaotic rollout of his tariff hikes and push to slash federal spending darken the outlook. After markets closed Monday, Delta Air Lines Inc. seemed to validate those fears by cutting its profit expectations, citing an erosion in consumer and corporate confidence due to increased uncertainty.

“There’s going to be a period where I think it’s going to be panic at the disco,” Amy Wu Silverman, RBC Capital Markets equity derivatives strategist, said on Bloomberg Television. “We haven’t gotten there yet. But as these levels climb there will be unwinds and more uncertainty that triggers even more.”

Of course, Trump and his administration had started signaling that there may be an adjustment period as he seeks to tame the swelling federal deficit and challenges the global economic order.

Trump’s comments over the weekend spurred all manner of Wall Street theorizing, with some saying he’d misjudged market sentiment and others arguing that he supported a stock selloff as a way to push down interest rates.

Trump is scheduled to meet with top business executives on Tuesday.

“It took a few weeks for Trump to break the international economic regime, presumably with a plan to fix and replace it with something ‘better,’” said Michael Rosen, chief investment officer of Angeles Investment Advisors. “Absent a clear idea of what ‘better’ is, investors are just left with the detritus of the broken global economic framework. Unless and until we see what replaces it, investors will be cautious, at best.”

In the face of that, traders dusted off the traditional playbooks and poured into defensive havens.

For bond traders, that meant short-term Treasuries, with 2-year notes leading Monday’s rally, driving their yields down some 11 basis points.

In the corporate debt market, as concerns about credit risk mounted, Wall Street bankers pulled about 10 deals that were set for high-grade companies and indexes showed investors were pulling back from lower-rated bonds. Bitcoin slid to a four-month low.

Much of the equity selling was centered on the giant tech stocks that had done so much to fuel the bull market. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 fell 3.8%, pushing it deeper into a correction. Tesla Inc. — once seen as benefiting from CEO Elon Musk’s close ties to Trump — tumbled over 15%.

As the carnage piled up, investors took refuge in shares of energy, consumer staples and utility companies — industries less susceptible to consumer-spending cutbacks that tend to fare well during slowdowns.

“If you’re a long-only equity investor, you still have to put your money somewhere,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. “If investors perceive that there’s rough weather ahead, these are the places where investors tend to hide out. Shelter from the storm.”

--With assistance from Jessica Menton, Elena Popina and Isabelle Lee.

(Adds reference to Trump meeting with CEOs in 11th paragraph.)