'A disaster': Expert says markets are engaging in 'collective puking' in response to Trump

Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson delivered a metaphor for the decline in several major economic measurements of the U.S. market this month.

Thompson described President Donald Trump as a bully who wants to strong-arm universities, the chairman of the federal reserve, and law firms into doing what he wants, using the “same Trump playbook over and over again”: Make a large threat, use the threat to try to enact a concession, use that concession to bolster his ego or his wallet and then “repeat, repeat, repeat,” Thompson told NBC News senior political analyst Nicolle Wallace.

But the playbook doesn’t work on market forces or the people working with them, who are independent of one man’s ego.

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“If you want to understand what people think about Donald Trump, look at the market. The bond market, the stock market. These are aggregates that cannot be bullied. They cannot be cajoled. They cannot be made to genuflect,” said Thompson. “These are anonymous people voting on what they see as the future of the American dollar and the American economy, and the future profitability of America’s publicly traded corporations. And, cumulatively, that vote is a kind of collective puking. The bond rates are puking, and the stock market is puking. It's a bunch of negative feedback”

Thompson added that the mass rejection would probably kick in long before the midterm or four year elections in 2026 and 2028.

“You have market feedback loops that are already kicking in and saying, ‘we don't need to wait for two-year and four-year meetings to tell you what we think about this economy.’ … We have a man in the Oval Office who is making no sense every single day and threatening to fire the people around him who are making sense, and that sounds like a disaster, not only for the next four years, but for the next decade. That's why we're seeing what we're seeing with the bond yields,” Thompson said.

Watch the video below, or by clicking here.

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