This post was originally published on this site
The stock market could be in for some more pain if President Donald Trump continues “business-bashing” like his predecessor Barack Obama, CNBC’s Jim Cramer predicts.
“It’s telling that the S&P 500 is the same valuation that it had in Obama’s second term. Even though long-term interest rates are a lot lower than they were in 2013, ” Cramer said Monday evening on “Mad Money.” “Wall Street didn’t exactly view Obama as pro-business,” due to the former president’s tough regulatory stance.
On Tuesday morning, stocks were seeing a broad-based bounce after weeks of struggles on persistent trade concerns and growing worries about whether the U.S. economy can stay strong. Talk of the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates steady for a while has turned to calls for possible rate cuts to halt any slide in growth.
Cramer, who praised many of Trump’s early pro-business moves such as deregulation and tax cuts, has been critical of Trump recently for threatening tariffs on Mexico aimed at curbing illegal immigration and for what appears to be the beginnings of a Big Tech antitrust crackdown at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.
“It’s possible that President Trump has realized something that Obama discovered when he was running for his second term: Most voters don’t own stocks anymore,” Cramer said, adding that as long as Trump’s poll numbers are up and the economy doesn’t nose-dive, the president feels he can do anything he wants.
In the beginning of his administration, Trump talked about the stock market all the time and viewed it as a report card on his policies. But lately, the pressure on the market does not seem to matter.
“For whatever reason, the president’s whims have trumped his pro-business attitude — he’s anti-business. And if the Trump administration is going to be less pro-business, investors are going to pay,” Cramer said. “Put it all together, you can understand why this market has been hammered for the past five weeks.”
