onald Trump never admits when he screws things up, still less apologizes for it. But on Thursday morning, when he took his daily plunge into Twitter, he was clearly trying to repair some of the damage he'd done on Tuesday, when his skeptical tweets about the weekend's ceasefire in the U.S.-China trade war had helped prompt a seven-hundred-and-ninety-nine-point fall in the Dow, the fourth-largest points drop in history.
“I am a Tariff Man,” Trump had written on Tuesday morning, and investors hadn't hung around to find out if he was bluffing. Already concerned about the possibility of a sharp slowdown in the U.S. economy next year, they had dumped stocks across the board, particularly in companies that would be hit hard by another escalation in the trade war. Boeing had fallen almost five per cent, Caterpillar almost seven per cent.
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