Donald Trump sends the stock market off a cliff
Last night Palmer Report warned you that the stock market was very likely to take a severe tumble today. Unfortunately, it turns out we were right. It’s not that we had a crystal ball. It’s just that we took at look at the Dow Futures last night and saw where things were headed.
Sure enough, after the Dow Futures dropped roughly three hundred points as of midnight last night, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now down roughly seven hundred points for the day as of lunchtime. There’s no real mystery what’s going on here. Investors are pulling back for two reasons, and they both relate directly to Donald Trump.
First, there’s the fact that Trump keeps pushing tariffs, even though everyone but him knows they’re a lose-lose proposition. Trump tweeted on Thursday afternoon that he was placing additional tariffs on Chinese goods, and the DJIA immediately began plummeting. It hasn’t recovered since. Trump tried yelling around again about China on Twitter an hour ago, but it didn’t help, and the market keeps dropping.
Second, Wall Street doesn’t like political instability in general. Investors are looking at this weekend’s mass shootings, at least one of which was clearly the work of a white supremacist who used Donald Trump’s tweets as a guidepost, and they’re looking at how mainstream Americans are (accurately) blaming Trump for it. This kind of political instability is enough to spook investors – almost as much as they’re spooked by tariffs.
