NEW YORK — As the U.S. and global stock markets plunged on Monday, two candidates stood to reap the biggest short-term benefit from the chaos: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Both are running as populist mavericks with bold — albeit very different — prescriptions for fixing what’s wrong with the American economy. And a backdrop of deep economic unease and blind market panic fits their message perfectly.


“If this market stuff keeps up or if general economic malaise worsens, it plays into the argument that everything traditional politicians are doing isn’t working and we need something radically different,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist and economist at Wells Capital Management. “It probably helps Trump the most because he can more vehemently argue that what’s going on is Obama and the Democrats’ fault.”

Trump wasted no time grabbing onto the market chaos, which began last week with huge falls in the Chinese stock market and kept rolling on Monday with steep falls on Wall Street.

“As I have long stated, we are so tied in with China and Asia that their markets are now taking the U.S. market down. Get smart U.S.A.,” the real estate billionaire tweeted. “Markets are crashing — all caused by poor planning and allowing China and Asia to dictate the agenda. This could get very messy! Vote Trump.”

It was classic Trump.

The facts are that the U.S. economy is not actually highly tied to China. And many market strategists believe the U.S. market was ripe for a significant correction with valuations at historic highs and fears rising over coming interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve. The Chinese decline was simply a convenient trigger. And by early Monday afternoon, the Dow Jones Industrial aAverage had already reversed much of its initial 1,000-point drop.

Shares took another leg down in the afternoon, however, with the Dow closing down 588.40, or 3.6 percent, to 15,871.35, it’s lowest closing level in a year and half. The Standard & Poor’s 500 and the Nasdaq also dropped nearly 4 percent. Still, many analysts say the sell-off should be temporary.

“China is a growing market for the U.S., but it is still very small. Even if you throw in all the rest of the emerging markets, it’s still just 2 percent of our GDP,” said Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics. “It’s a problem for big U.S. companies like Apple and GM that want to take market share among Chinese consumers. But it’s not doing damage to most of the U.S. economy. And this is hardly a market calamity. It’s simply a correction that takes us back to where we were in the spring of 2014, which was a pretty good place.”

But Trump’s candidacy is not based on logical precision but rather intense emotion. The same is true for Sanders, who also seized on the market moment in a tweet from the populist left: “For the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class have rigged the rules to redistribute wealth to the richest among us.”

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also got in on the action calling for President Barack Obama to cancel the upcoming state visit by Chinese President Xi Jingping in retaliation for cyber attacks and currency manipulation. “There’s serious work to be done rather than pomp and circumstance,” Walker said in a statement to TIME magazine.

To a large extent, the market collapse simply augments economic factors already driving the Trump and Sanders insurgencies including stagnant wages, increasing economic inequality and a growth rate that is the worst of any modern-day recovery. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs has driven Trump to the top of GOP polls and helped Sanders pack rallies and draw closer to Democratic poll leader Hillary Clinton in the early voting states.

It has also made it much harder for traditional, establishment candidates running standard-issue campaigns like Clinton and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to get any kind of significant traction. Who wants more of the same when the world seems to be falling apart?

“If you are an anti-establishment candidate right now, you are going to use this to further the notion that China is taking advantage of us and that the U.S. stock market is rigged and that nobody in the establishment or Washington is doing anything about it,” said GOP consultant Lenny Alcivar. “But the problem for these candidates is that this is coming in August of 2015 and not January of 2016 or even late in the fall of 2016 — and it’s not at all clear that it will last and it would be foolish for any of the establishment candidates to go down this rabbit hole.”

And market analysts and economists say there are many reasons to believe the U.S. stock market correction will be short-lived and that underlying strengths will lead to faster growth, higher wages and better consumer sentiment by the end of this year, making the messages of Trump, Sanders and other outsiders less appealing.

Figures from the government out on Thursday are expected to show that the U.S. economy — which is still largely based on domestic consumer spending — grew more than 3% in the second quarter, a strong bounce back from the terrible winter. The slowdown in China also has caused commodity prices, including oil, to plunge. This will likely drive gas prices in the U.S. to less than $2 per gallon, a massive economic stimulus for consumers heading into the fall season when retailers make most of their money.

“The U.S. economy is gradually improving, inflation is low, energy prices are low and we are still a mostly closed economy oriented toward services,” said David Kotok, chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors. “Right now, there is an opportunity for some candidates to make bold statements that will have wide appeal but the reaction to China was clearly overdone and the U.S. still has a very positive outlook.”

Economic analysts say there is very little chance of the U.S. going back into any kind of recession that would further boost Trump and Sanders’s candidacies and make it difficult for any of the establishment candidates — especially Hillary Clinton — to compete.

The White House seized on the better economic backdrop on Monday. “There is no doubt that the U.S. economy is stronger than it was in 2008,” press secretary Josh Earnest said when asked about the market declines.

Indeed, most predictions are for solid if unspectacular growth the rest of this year and next and some relatively healthy increases in personal income and consumer sentiment.

“The market has been very vulnerable since late last year and the focus has been on China but that’s not really what’s behind it,” said Paulsen, who pointed to stocks trading at a historically high 19 times earnings as the real reason for the selloff. “Things might still get a little scarier but that will still be OK, there will be opportunities to buy. And in three of [the] last four recoveries since the late 1970s, we’ve seen commodity price collapses each time and they have been very stimulative events for the economy.”

In other words, the summer of discontent fueling the rise of Trump and Sanders could give way to a stronger fall that could allow a return of the establishment.

“The smart political candidates would be wise to follow the smart economic experts,” said Alcivar. “And they’ve said the thing to do is just take a deep breath and don’t panic.”