Investors looking for President Donald Trump to use policy to stop the stock market from falling are likely to be disappointed, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday.
Though stocks initially popped when Trump was elected last November, the market has given up all of its gains since then. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is off about 2% since the inauguration in volatile trading that has seen markets surge and swoon depending on the headlines of the day.
There’s been some talk of a “Trump put” in which the president might try to intervene to support the market, but Bessent rejected that notion during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“There’s no put,” he said. “The Trump call on the upside is, if we have good policies, then the markets will go up.”
Puts and calls are terms used in the options market. A put gives the holder the option to buy at a predetermined level while a call allows the holder to sell at the level. In policy parlance, a put would imply that Trump would try to stop market selling at some point.
During his first term in office, Trump watched the stock market closely and used it as a barometer to judge his economic performance. In recent days, Bessent has said the administration is looking less at stock prices and more at bond yields as a measure that inflation pressures are easing and the market outlook is better calibrated toward the administration’s views.
The 10-year Treasury yield has plunged lately, down more than half a percentage point from its mid-January peak.
“Did the Biden administration succeed? The American people weren’t buying it just because the market was up,” Bessent said. “They voted out the Democrats.”