By
Bena Ilyas
April 22nd, 2024
President Trump and the First Lady tested positive for COVID-19 a few days after the first presidential debate with Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden.
As the world woke up for the last stock market trading day of the first week in October 2020, United States President Donald Trump tweeted that he and the First Lady have tested positive for the coronavirus.
Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2020
Consequently, major global stock market indexes turned red during the Asian trading session but managed to recover the loss during the London trading session. U.S. equity futures went from modest to sharper losses on the news. Whereby Dow futures were down 396 points, S&P 500 fell 1.3% and Nasdaq-100 sank 1.6%. In addition, the crypto market that is highly affected by speculative trading turned red led by the top digital asset Bitcoin.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at around $10,471, 1.43% down in regards to yesterday’s close. Ethereum and XRP were down 3.15% and 2.29% respectively at the time of writing.
Trump and First Lady Coronavirus Positive
The recovery of the market is attributed to the First lady’s comments that they were “feeling good.” Hereby eliminating investors’ fear and minimizing market sell-off. President Trump and his wife tested positive a few days after the first presidential debate with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
During the debate, Trump indicated that he was not wearing a mask since everybody in the building had been tested and none was positive. This begs the question whether he got infected during the presidential debate, before or after. Whatever the case is, the White House employees are all at high risk of having contracted the virus and so are all the participants in the presidential debate.
Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst, Asia Pacific OANDA, said:
“This is potentially a strong market negative. The key issue to my mind is has Covid-19 spread to the upper echelons of the U.S. government including the Senate leadership? It has the potential to bring to a halt any ongoing talks over fiscal stimulus for example”.
Trump recovery from the virus could set his polls higher against his main opponent, Joe Biden. As a result, markets would recover and continue rising amid fears of election disruptions.
Halley added:
“We will need to watch this development closely over today and the weekend. Markets dislike certainty and I expect Trump’s diagnosis to drown out the nonfarm payrolls this afternoon. I will be looking for equities to track lower with a move into risk hedging. That is gold, the U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasuries”.
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