Source: Huffingotn Post

By Ben Walsh

Business Reporter, The Huffington Post

Shortly after the first presidential debate, former Obama adviser David Axelrod said on CNN that the commander in chief “can send armies marching and markets tumbling.”

Investors, it seems, are being reminded of this as polls show Hillary Clinton’s numbers dropping. The S&P 500 was down Friday for the ninth straight day, something that hasn’t happened since 1980. “The U.S. elections are the elephant in the room for markets,” Julius Baer’s head of research Christian Gatticker told Bloomberg. Donald Trump is still a long shot, consistently trailing Clinton in key swing states, but the stock market seems to be evaluating his odds for what they are: a low, if real, chance of economic harm.

Deporting some 11 million undocumented immigrants, building a wall along the border with America’s third biggest trading partner, starting a trade war with Mexico and China that would destroy 4 million U.S. jobs: These are all deeply harmful economic policies.

Moody’s says Trump’s policies would throw the U.S. economy into the longest recession since the Great Depression. Citigroup thinks a Trump win could cause a global depression. By a different measure, Trump in the White House would cause the American economy to shrink by $1 trillion over five years, according to British research firm Oxford Economics.

That a campaign based on those ideas still has by some estimates a 35 percent chance of winning should scare markets.

As Trump’s chances of winning have risen and Clinton’s chances have fallen, the stock market has reacted with the most prolonged sell-off since the financial crisis, as this chart compiled by the Financial Times’ John Authers shows: