President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the swings the stock market saw in December were due to a “glitch,” adding that stocks would rise once his trade deals have been resolved.
“Our country is doing by far than any other country in the world. We’re the talk of the world,” Trump said. “We had a little glitch in the stock market last month, but we’re still up about 30 percent from the time I got elected.”
He also told reporters that the stock market will “go up once we settle trade issues and a couple of other things happen,” stressing that it has a “long way to go.”
CNBC reports that the S&P 500 dropped over 9 percent for its worst December performance since 1931 and U.S. stocks lost around $2.9 trillion in value the same month. Those losses also pushed the broad stock index to its worst annual performance since 2008, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices’ Howard Silverblatt.
Equities also plummeted last month due to investors’ fears that the Federal Reserve might be making a monetary policy mistake, worries about a possible economic slowdown, and ongoing trade negotiations between China and the United States.
In December, all major indexes had their worst performance since the financial crisis in 2008, with the S&P 500 down 6.2 percent for the year, the Dow 5.6 percent, and the Nasdaq falling by 3.9 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened down 350 points on Wednesday, before leveling out by mid-afternoon, CNBC adds.
“Everybody is terrified that this is a sign of a global slowdown,” Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS, said. “It was only eight months ago we were talking about synchronized growth and all of that is falling apart.”
President Trump put the blame for the stock market swings on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, arguing that he needed to “feel the market” before raising the central bank’s benchmark borrowing rate.
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