When Donald Trump claimed over the weekend that he’d put his singular negotiating skills to work to strike an “incredible” trade deal with China, he likely believed the stock market, his favorite barometer of success, was going to reward him handsomely. “DOW 50,000! INVESTORS ARE SHOWING PRESIDENT T THE LOVE!!” went the tweet he likely composed in his head. “This is what happens when you send a Real negotiator to the Table!” he’d presumably continue, trademark bizarre capitalization and all. And for a brief period, the market did react favorably to the news, if not overwhelmingly, with the Dow closing Monday up 287 points, and the S&P 500 climbing 30.20 points for its best start to December in eight years. And then investors realized that the 45th president is full of s--t, and that maybe, in the words of Tom Gara, they shouldn’t “move hundreds of billions of dollars based on literally a Trump tweet that's like ‘by the way, the problem is solved, we solved it very big and people say it’s incredible.’” And once Wall Street remembered that it’s not necessarily advisable to take the word of a guy who makes, on average, 30 “false or misleading claims a day”, this happened:

Of course, the realization that Trump’s “incredible” deal—the one he essentially admitted on Tuesday is bulls--t!—exists only within the four walls of his head wasn’t the only thing that caused markets to fall off a cliff. His abrupt 180, from claiming China was dropping tariffs on U.S.-made cars to threatening to slap Beijing with still more tariffs, because he’s a “Tariff Man”, probably didn’t help, nor did persistent fears of an economic slowdown that the administration has insisted are fake news: