President Donald Trump said that he believed that the stock market would crash if were to be impeached:
‘I think everybody would be very poor, because without this thinking, you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe, in reverse.’ President Donald Trump“I’ll tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash,” he said during an interview on the Fox News program “Fox & Friends” on Thursday.
He told the morning program that he expects that critics and adversaries will attempt to impeach him and that he is bracing for attempts to oust him from the Oval Office.
Trump’s comments come as associates of the commander-in-chief have been embroiled in an array of legal problems. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort late Tuesday was found guilty on eight charges including tax fraud, and the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, said he violated campaign-finance law at Trump’s direction.
Despite the legal woes that could threaten Trump’s presidency, the market has been demonstrating remarkable resilience.
See: Here’s why Trump’s legal woes aren’t rattling stock-market investors
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.34% has gained 4.1% thus far in 2018, while the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.04% has risen by more than 7% over the past eight months, and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.38% has gained more than 14% so far this year, according to FactSet data. Moreover, the current bull market, by some measures, is the longest on record, spanning 3,453 days, as of Wednesday’s close.
Trump has often hitched his political wagon to the performance of stock market.
However, some market participants believe that the president, despite his pro-growth policies and the corporate tax cuts enacted late last year, isn’t the main driver for the current market expansion.
“Online prediction markets now make the odds that President Trump will be impeached at 45%, a new high. Equity markets don’t seem to care, and we think they are right,” wrote Nicholas Colas, co-founder of market analytics firm DataTrek Research in a Thursday note.
Based on data from PredictIt.Org, the current odds that Trump will be president at the end of the year stand at 90%, the odds of him holding the office at the end of 2019 are 67%, while those for him being impeached at some point in his first term stand at 45%.
Colas said low rates and, solid corporate earnings and a strong dollar have been the real underpinnings of the market’s bullish tilt.
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