SPX: S&P 500 Futures Plummet 4% as Trump Comments Spark Global Market Selloff

Trump spoke to journalists aboard Air Force One, saying that “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

💥 S&P 500 Futures Sell Off Again

• Futures contracts tied to the S&P 500 index were down sharply ahead of the opening bell on Monday after Donald Trump made a series of comments. Apparently, the US President isn’t backing out of his game of tariffs and investors all around the globe fled risk, resulting in widespread selloff waves just about anywhere.
• S&P 500 futures slipped as much as 4% in pre-market trading Monday, threatening to take the index’s losses to $7 trillion in just three days. The broad-based Wall Street gauge followed declines in Asia where the MSCI Asia Pacific index plunged by the most since the financial crisis of 2008 — a steep 8% drop.

👀 To Do List: Golfing and Then Crashing the Market

• Trump struck a determined tone speaking to journalists aboard Air Force One on his way back to the White House from another weekend of golfing (yes, while stocks were a dumpster fire).
• “What’s going to happen with the market? I can’t tell you,” he told reporters. “But I can tell you our country has gotten a lot stronger, and eventually it’ll be a country like no other.” “I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” he added.

💡 What’s a Trade Deficit?

• A big scare for the stock market is Trump’s unwillingness to look past America’s trade deficit when slapping countries with tariffs. In his words, US partners first need to wipe out their trade surplus for him to negotiate deals.
• “We have to solve our trade deficit with China,” he said. “We have a trillion-dollar trade deficit with China, hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China. And unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal.”
• What’s a trade deficit? A country has a trade deficit when the value of its imports to another country exceeds that of its exports to the same country. In this light, it’s unrealistic to expect that Vietnam, for example, could even out its $136.6 billion of exports to the US by importing US goods for the same amount.