Trump keeps talking during market hours; stocks keep tanking

WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Donald Trump speaks, financial markets gyrate and quiver in real time.

But that hasn't stopped the president from holding forth almost daily about the coronavirus pandemic and its economic implications without waiting until markets have closed for the day.

While many of his predecessors worked consciously to not affect the markets, Trump has overtly made market movements and performance a measure of his effectiveness and central to his argument for a second term.

Earlier this week, public health officials announced a surge of infections in the U.S. as leading economists predicted unemployment spiking to 10% or more. Trump, meanwhile, took the White House podium in the middle of the trading day to offer an optimistic take on his administration’s response to the crisis.

“One of the elements that is being worked on very much so on the Hill is to keep the jobs going so that when we do get rid of the virus, we're going to be able to just really...go like a rocket,” said Trump on Thursday as at the market spiked more than 300 points, then dove into negative territory and then inched back into positive territory over the course of his 77-minute press conference. “I think the economy is going to be fantastic.”

The president headed to the same place again on Friday while the markets were open for an even longer news conference, where he vacillated between expressing optimism and lashing out about “nasty” journalists' negativity.

Amid more difficult news—the number of confirmed infections around the globe surpassed 250,000 cases—the Dow Jones industrial average closed down more than 4.5 percent on Friday.

At the end of the market's heaviest losses in more than 30 years, the market closed at 19,173.98, below where it stood on...