President Trump has drawn the ire of Democrats, Ukrainians, transgender athletes, and college presidents, but people on Wall Street always assumed the president would never do anything to upset them.
Shortly after the election in November, for instance, Ed Mills, the Washington policy analyst at Raymond James, put it this way: “Donald Trump cares about independent validators. And the biggest independent validator of his success is the market. It’s a daily voting mechanism. It serves as a potential binding restraint to aggressive policies.”
Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research at global financial services firm BTIG, agreed. “Ultimately, the only entity that has real power over the president’s thinking about his agenda is the stock market,” he told CNN.
In other words, the market was going to be the one guardrail the incoming president would respect. Which made Wall Street very happy.