Trump predicts stock market crash if he were to be impeached
US President Donald Trump today suggested his impeachment would cause the stock market to crash.
In an interview with Fox & Friends, Trump warned against any attempts to remove him from power.
"If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor," he told Fox News this afternoon.
"Because without this thinking, you would see numbers that you wouldn't believe in reverse," Trump said, pointing to himself. "I got rid of regulations. The tax cut was a tremendous thing."
"I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job," he added.
Trump also suggested that cooperating with authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence "almost ought to be illegal", as he lashed out against his former lawyer Michael Cohen.
Read more: Trump hits back at Michael Cohen after plea deal
Earlier this week, Cohen accepted a plea deal while implicating Trump in multiple instances of campaign finance fraud. He said "the candidate" – here referring to Trump – knew about funds taken from the 2016 presidential campaign to pay for the silence of several of his former flames.
Minutes before Cohen's plea, in which admitted a total of eight count, including tax and bank fraud, Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort was also convicted on eight charges of bank and tax fraud.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average has been little affected by the ongoing legal drama between Trump and his former advisers, falling only slightly on Wednesday with little change as markets opened this afternoon.
Moreover the S&P 500 yesterday broke past the longest bull market on record, by some measures, at 3,453 days.
Craig Erlam, a senior market analyst at Oanda, told City PM that while the immediate market reaction to an impeachment could be negative, such a situation would not be unique to Trump.
"While Trump may wish us to believe this is due to investors’ confidence in him and the disastrous consequences for the economy of an impeachment, I actually believe this would happen irrespective of who the President is due to the sheer uncertainty such political instability would cause," Erlam said.
"The market may have rallied strongly since his election but this has a lot to do with the tax cuts that were implemented late last year – which is evident in the first two quarters earnings reports – and the acceleration in what was already a strong economy. None of this changes in the event of an impeachment in a major way so I don’t believe any turmoil would be lasting."
"In fact, the longer-term impact could be positive. One drag on the markets right now is the threat of a trade war between the US and many other countries, something that could be avoided in the event of his impeachment."