Markets that climbed the Trump bump are tumbling down from it

And Trump was the bull-in-chief, celebrating the record-breaking march as validation of his economic policies. Those days are done.

Even after a fast start to 2018, stock markets finished the first quarter down for the year — the first quarterly decline since 2015. It suggested that a period of calm and steadily rising markets had given way to a turbulent new era with a bearish bent.

The plunge continued Monday, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index sinking 2.2 percent. Investors jettisoned shares of financial, technology and many other businesses, spooked at least in part by a tweet from Trump aimed at one of the country’s biggest companies: Amazon.

Asian markets fell more modestly in early-Tuesday trading.

Monday’s decline left stocks down more than 4 percent so far in 2018. They are now down more than 10 percent from their peak in late January. That means the market has entered a correction — a term used to indicate that the downward trend is more severe and lasting than simply a few days of bearish trading.

The stock market is still up more than 20 percent since Nov. 8, 2016, the day Trump won the White House — a roller-coaster ride driven in part by expectations about what a Trump presidency could bring to Washington.

At first, the prospect of Republicans controlling the White House and both houses of Congress thrilled investors. They anticipated a wave of regulatory rollbacks and the slashing of corporate and personal tax rates. Many of those dreams have been realized, culminating in Trump signing a huge tax cut into law in December. When the S&P 500 notched its high-water mark of 2872.87 on Jan. 26, it represented a roughly 325 percent increase since the bull market began in March 2009.

But since February, a toxic stew of factors — many but certainly not all of them emanating from Washington — has polluted what had been the market’s placidly rising waters. And there’s little prospect of the messes dissipating anytime soon.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Markets that climbed the Trump bump are tumbling down from it

In the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, ebullient investors propelled stock markets to one record high after another.

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