Pro-Business President Throws His Hair-Curler In Wall Streets Bathtub:
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Something you may have picked up on in the 71 years that Donald Trump has polluted the earth is that he has a pathological need to take credit for events, real or imagined, even—or perhaps especially—when his connection to said events is incidental at best… Nowhere, however, does this phenomenon rear its papaya-colored head more readily than when it comes to the economy. So obsessed is Trump with the idea of having the power to move markets that he once straight-up bragged about crashing healthcare stocks. In general, though, the 45th president has stuck to taking credit for positive economic indicators, even if the actual credit belongs to his predecessor. So it’s rather curious that Trump has lately seemed intent on scaring the ever-loving hell out of investors—a strategy that Monday resulted in the Dow falling nearly 758 points midday to close down 458.92 points; the S&P 500 dropping 58.99 points; and the NASDAQ sinking 193.33 points. For the history buffs out there, equities recorded their worst second-quarter start since 1929, shortly before the Great Depression.
So far, the president has been unusually bashful about the matter, not tweeting even once to claim credit for sending the market off of a cliff (if he had, we assume the tweet would have been along the lines of “I moved on those tech stocks like a b*tch”), despite the fact that he may actually deserve it. Granted, diagnosing markets is generally a losing game, but experts believe that yet another of Trump’s early-morning tantrums about Amazon combined with a sluice of Trumpian bullshit to precipitate Monday’s slide…
Nor did Trump’s outlook on trade in general, which was served a dose of reality over the weekend when China announced it would slap tariffs as high as 25 percent on 128 American-made imports, including wine, pipes, and pork—the latter being a significant moneymaker for farming regions that voted for Trump. China had been expected to hit back following the president’s tariffs on aluminum and steel, but this was a more significant response than expected, with Beijing presumably taking one look at the White House’s additional China-targeted tariffs and saying, Screw it, we’ll do it live.
Taken together, these factors had Wall Street in a cold sweat. “The Trump administration’s announcements on trade sanctions in total so far encompass a relatively small portion of overall U.S. trade,”Jason Pride, chief investment officer at Glenmede Wealth Management, wrote in a note to investors. “However, this could only be the beginning, as the Trump administration ponders the extension of further sanctions on the Chinese trade relationship.” Nick Raich, C.E.O. of The Earnings Scout, told CNBC: “The new bearish narrative is that tariffs implemented by the Trump administration will spur a global trade war that would spiral the world into a recession. We understand the fear. We get how bad a global trade war would be on future profits.”…
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/donald-trump-amazon-tariffs
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