The indictment in Atlanta of former U.S. President Donald Trump, and not the latest round of weak China economic data, is the reason for an early struggle in the stock market on Tuesday, according to CNBC commentator Jim Cramer.
Noting that China responded to weak data with a surprise interest-rate cut, Cramer tweeted out that the market might instead be focused on the U.S. presidential race.
Ahead of U.S. retail sales data, the S&P 500 contract
ES00,
slumped by 0.6%.
It wasn’t until hours after Trump’s indictment in Fulton County, in Georgia, was announced that stock futures began moving lower.
According to the betting site Betfair, Trump’s odds of capturing the presidency did worsen, to 13-to-5 from 9-to-4. Expressed another way, Trump now is being given a 38% chance of being elected in 2024, versus a previous estimate of a 44% possibility.
President Joe Biden is the favorite to win the 2024 race, though betting markets assign small chances to other Republican candidates including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. On the Democratic side, Biden challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (who isn’t running) have 21-to-1 odds.
Trump was criminally indicted by a grand jury in Fulton County on Monday night in connection with a probe into his efforts to overturn the state’s results in the 2020 presidential election.
Biden won Georgia, with its 16 votes in the Electoral College, by 11,779 votes.
This story originally appeared on Marketwatch
