Donald Trump opens his big mouth and immediately sends the stock market off a cliff
Yesterday the stock market took a tumble after Fed Chair Jay Powell basically announced that he wasn’t going to continue cutting interest rates going forward. Trump had been banking on additional cuts in order to compensate for the damage done by his failed trade war. Now it appears the economy may end up in a full blown recession by the time of the 2020 election. Because Trump can’t admit failure and change course, today he made it even worse.
The stock market was having a steady and slightly above-average day today. Then Donald Trump announced on Twitter at 1:26pm eastern time that because his earlier tariffs on Chinese goods predictably failed to push China into a trade deal, he’s now going to place even larger tariffs on Chinese goods. This is a recipe for disaster, and U.S. investors immediately responded.
When Trump posted his tweet, the Dow Jones Industrial Average immediately began plummeting. The DJIA lost around 375 points in a span of just nineteen minutes. By the time the markets closed for the day, the DJIA was 540 points below where it had been when Trump posted his tweet.
This is the latest reminder that Wall Street investors consider Donald Trump to be so toxic to the health of the economy, they start pulling their money out of the market every time he even talks about the economy. Trump is simply too stubborn or delusional to admit that his trade war was a stupid idea.
