It was a beautiful blue-sky day here in Seattle, but another Black Monday on the financial markets.
Not the Federal Reserve’s emergency rate cut of 100 basis points (to zero), that was announced on Sunday, nor Trump’s press conference at the close of the bell on Monday, made much of a difference.
All three Wall Street indexes opened 12% down. The circuit breakers kicked in. After 15 minutes, trading resumed for the rest of the day, but without any uptick.
Falling off a cliff: we’re now almost back at January 2017 levels, when Trump took office. Trump has been very fond of tweeting out something like ‘Highest Stock Market in History!’. Just this Friday, he gloated about the day’s ‘huge gains’. (Pro tip: single-day gains are almost meaningless in such a choppy market; a ‘dead cat bounce’).Blue skies and blossoms from my second floor window. Smith Brothers’ cow truck is delivering fresh milk to my neighbor. A little while later the UPS truck came by and dropped my new tennis shoes I had ordered online. Puget Sound Energy put up ‘No Parking’ signs along the sidewalk. They are going to chop up the asphalt any day now, to work on the gas line buried beneath it.
