Unhinged Trump goes after Fed, US companies on economy

So, for the first four days of the week that stock markets actually seemed to have stabilized. Then Trump unleashed his attack on the Fed and later called on US companies to pull out of China in retaliation for tariff increases they put on American exports in retaliation for US tariffs on Chinese exports...and visions of the circling down the drain of trade wars circa 1930 began dancing in investors heads. The result is graphically obvious:




That's a 2.59 percent decrease in the S&P 500 on the day. After four straight weeks of losses, the index is down 5.71 percent. What's driving this decline? Trump: his destabilizing trade wars, whack-a-mole announcements on cutting/not cutting payroll taxes, attacks on the Fed, mixed messages on a potential recession and how he'd deal with it, lack of confidence in his hare-brained economic team, and his generally unstable, demented behavior. Or as conservative columnist Megan McArdle put it today:

"This is not normal. And I don’t mean that as in, 'Trump is violating the shibboleths of the Washington establishment.' I mean that as in, 'This is not normal for a functioning adult.' I’m not trying to perform some sort of amateur diagnosis of Trump as a narcissist, or a psychopath, or an early-stage dementia patient. I’m not Trump’s doctor, and I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Very possibly, it’s simply a terminal case of 'billionairitis,'a well-known condition where very rich people slowly lose the ability to tolerate anything except the most obsequious flattery.

"But I don’t need a diagnosis to know that the symptoms are pretty worrying. If your company’s owner abruptly pulled out of a conference with an important joint-venture partner just because the other CEO said something mildly unflattering, would you try to defend it as some sort of cunning N-dimensional chess move? Or would you start looking for another job? If your mother canceled a family visit because your cousin wouldn’t sell her the bedroom, would you get mad at your cousin for slighting your mother’s honor? Or would you try to arrange a neurological consult?

"Hopefully, you wouldn’t just smile and say, 'No, really, everything’s fine,' when it’s very obviously not. The longer you humor people who have clearly gone off the rails, the more time they have to damage themselves and those around them. Moreover, the damage is usually fiercest to the people closest by — which in Trump’s case means the folks who have been standing loyally behind him for the past three years." link