The US stock market has had a bumpy ride since United States President Donald Trump’s election in November.
After hitting record highs in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, US stocks have shed trillions of dollars amid his dizzying back-and-forth announcements on tariffs and growing fears of a recession.
While Trump has played down the turbulence as a temporary “period of transition” on the road to a stronger economy, supporters and critics of the US president alike have speculated without evidence that he may be trying to crash the stock market on purpose.
What is happening with the US stock market?
Trump’s vacillating economic policies have created uncertainty – something investors famously dislike.
The benchmark S&P500, which tracks the performance of 500 of the biggest US firms, has lost nearly $5 trillion in value from its February 19 peak.
On March 10, the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 4 percent – its worst single-day drop since September 2022.
Regardless of whether Trump is playing the long game as he claims, the past month “stands out for both the amount of uncertainty and the variety of fronts”, Tara Sinclair, director of the George Washington University Center for Economic Research, told Al Jazeera.
The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, which the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis produces based on news coverage of economic policy-related issues, in February hit its highest level since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index in January reached its highest point on record apart from May 2020.
Why are some people claiming that Trump wants to crash the stock market?
There are several unsubstantiated theories about why Trump might want to crash the stock market, but chief among them is that he is trying to make it easier to pay off the US’s $36 trillion national debt by lowering interest rates.
Since taking office, Trump has both expressed concern about the size of the debt and called on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.
In a recent interview with FOX News, he claimed that “nobody ever gets rich when the interest rates are high, because people can’t borrow money.”
With a debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio of about 120 percent, the federal debt is approaching its highest level since the end of World War II.
It is also expensive to pay off – the US government last year spent more than $1 trillion on interest payments alone.
Some Trump supporters have claimed that he is intentionally trying to induce economic pain to force the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which would make it cheaper to refinance the national debt.
“Trump is setting up a stock market crash. The US government needs to refinance $7 trillion in debt over the next 6 months,” crypto influencer and investor Thomas Kralow, who has more than 500,000 YouTube followers, said on X last week.
“Trump doesn’t want this done at current 10-year yields. This is why he’s letting the stock market drop while pushing bond prices higher,” Kralow said, adding this would create “short term pain, long term gain”.
While the Federal Reserve makes its decisions independent of the White House and US Congress, it typically lowers the cost of borrowing during difficult economic conditions in order to stimulate growth.
When interest rates go down, the government also pays out lower yields on US Treasury bonds – essentially a type of loan to the government – thereby reducing the cost of interest paid on outstanding debt.
If bond yields were to come down, the US government would be able to pay substantially lower interest payments on the debt that needs refinancing, which is expected to amount to some $9 trillion in 2025, according to an estimate by Axel Funhoff, a professor at the Antwerp Management School in Belgium.
“For the better part of a decade, the US benefitted from historically low interest rates. These lower rates enabled the government to finance its debt at rates around 2.7 percent,” Funhoff said in a LinkedIn post in January.
Compared with that era of cheap borrowing, current interest rates are much higher: The yields on 10-year Treasury bonds and 5-year Treasury bonds stood at 4.3 percent and 4 percent, respectively, on Friday.
Why are some Trump critics saying he wants to ‘buy the dip’?
A different theory circulating among some Trump critics suggests that he is deliberately tanking the stock market to reward himself and his supporters, including conservative Wall Street investors and MAGA-supporting Silicon Valley CEOs.
Proponents of this theory claim that Trump induced a market tumble so that he and his allies can “buy the dip” – in other words, buy stocks at a discount before the market bounces back.
“[Trump] is purposely manipulating the stock markets …. Tariff scare, markets go down his rich buddies buy the dip, afterwards tariff off, stock market goes back up, said rich friends get richer… He needs to be investigated,” X user AKASabraFella said last week.
So does Trump actually want the stock market to crash?
While the Trump administration has played down the turmoil in the markets, it has not given any indication that it actually wants the stock prices to go down.
Indeed, Trump has in the past often boasted about the performance of stocks on his watch when the market has been bullish.
Kathleen Brooks, the founder of market analysis company Minerva Analysis, said she did not believe Trump was purposely trying to cause the market to drop.
“The US economy peaked in November and since then US economic data has been trending lower and surprisingly on the downside. This means that the bond market had to play catch-up,” Brooks told Al Jazeera, adding that other assets like Bitcoin have also fallen from their peak.
“It is not unusual for markets to move in unison like this. This undermines the view that the moves in the Treasury market are a conspiracy theory. Instead, there are good fundamental reasons for the decline,” she said.
Some market analysts have also suggested that the market is overvalued and long overdue a correction – Wall Street lingo for a drop of more than 10 percent from its peak.
Legendary investor Warren Buffett, whose market moves are closely watched due to his decades-long record of outperforming the S&P 500, dumped at least $134bn in stocks in 2024 in a sell-off that was widely interpreted as a signal that the market was running too hot.