President Trump gave himself an A+ for his job performance in a friendly interview with Fox & Friends' Ainsley Earhardt broadcast Thursday, and he thought so highly of his governing skills, he turned them into a novel argument against impeachment. "I don't know how you can impeach somebody who's done a great job," he said. "I'll tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor, because without this thinking," he added, pointing to his head, "you would see numbers that you wouldn't believe, in reverse."
On CNNMoney, Paula Newton disagreed with that assessment, and she got backup from New York Stock Exchange floor trader Peter Tuchman.
Historically, Axios notes, "stocks continued to rise during and after Bill Clinton's impeachment, which occurred a bit earlier in a long bull market than where we're at today. Stocks fell when Richard Nixon resigned, but markets were reacting to a confluence of other events like a global oil crisis."
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Stock Trader's Almanac researcher Christopher Mistral told Axios that the markets haven't flinched at the news of Paul Manafort's conviction or Michael Cohen's guilty pleas, and "because impeachment of Trump has been talked about for so long I would not expect it to not have any real impact on the market even if it does happen." Vice President Mike Pence "would become president and the majority of the policies that Trump has put in place would stay in place," he added. It's also worth noting that only 54 percent Americans own any stock at all, including through mutual funds or 401(k)s, according to a 2017 Gallup report, and "the richest 10 percent of households controlled 84 percent of the total value of these stocks in 2016," New York University economist Edward Wolff wrote in a 2017 study.
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