“We doubt that capital markets would collapse if President Trump’s administration was endangered, either electorally or indeed legally,” William Hobbs, head of investment strategy at Barclays Investment Solutions in London, said in a blog post. The U.S. stock market is in the middle of the longest bull market ever and traders have been piling into American equity funds, while pulling money from European and emerging-market investments, as the booming economy makes the U.S. a haven. Examples of investigations into the conduct of former presidents Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon show that the state of the economy defined the market’s direction, not the leaders’ legal troubles, according to Barclays. In Nixon’s case, the oil crisis and recession hit equity and bond markets before his resignation, while during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, stocks maintained a rally fuelled by the dot-com bubble, Barclays said. “The lesson from all this is that the wider economic context matters most for capital markets,” Hobbs wrote.

Source: thestar September 06, 2018 18:10 UTC