Washington is effectively rewriting the mandate of the Energy Department’s flagship lending arm, pivoting it away from the Biden-era role of scaling wind, solar and grid-heavy decarbonization projects and toward Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda centered on fossil fuels, nuclear, critical minerals and industrial supply chains.

The administration said it is restructuring or eliminating nearly $84 billion of clean-energy projects financed under the prior administration after a review of roughly $104 billion in outstanding loan commitments, much of it issued late in the 2024 election cycle.

Markets are relearning an old lesson about the Trump era: volatility is not just a function of economic data, but of political optionality. As President Donald Trump begins the second year of his second term, the trade-and-geopolitics complex that has repeatedly jolted risk sentiment is back in the foreground, and the initial market response suggests investors are less willing to reflexively “buy the dip” than they were after last year’s tariff shocks.

The immediate trigger was Trump’s escalation of tariff threats against European allies in connection with his push to control Greenland, an issue that markets read not merely as a trade dispute, but as a stress test of the transatlantic security architecture.

Market volatility picked up across multiple asset classes on Tuesday as investors repriced U.S. political and trade risk following President Donald Trump’s threat to revive tariff pressure on Europe. The key feature was the breadth of the move: U.S. equities fell, long-dated Treasuries sold off, and the dollar weakened, an unusual combination that signals investors are not simply rotating between “risk-on” and “risk-off,” but reassessing the attractiveness of U.S. assets themselves.

The dynamic is a reprise of last year’s “Sell America” episode after the April “Liberation Day” tariff shock, when markets briefly treated U.S. policy as the primary source of volatility rather than the anchor of stability. This time, the trigger was renewed tariff threats against European allies, which raised the probability of retaliation and renewed trade uncertainty.