Donald Trump’s potential impeachment is a “huge risk” for American financial markets in the coming year, an investment expert says.
This week, Steve Okun of the financial consulting firm McLarty Associates said that the likelihood of Trump’s impeachment will be significant in 2019 now that Democrats are taking control of the House of Representatives, and with that could come significant risks. In an interview on CNBC , Okun said that comments by incoming House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler about Trump committing “impeachable offenses” leads him to believe that Democrats will start impeachment proceedings sometime in the coming year.
“Whether the Democrats will impeach Trump, he didn’t say, but he said he committed impeachable offenses and that came with the hush money cover up and certainly can come with the obstruction of justice with the Mueller report comes out,” Okun said.
If that happens, Okun said he does not expect Donald Trump — or anyone else in Washington, for that matter — to get much of anything done. That could be potentially dangerous for American markets, he said.
“Washington is going to shut down, literally… because the president is not going to be able to focus on anything but that. I think that is a huge risk going into 2019,” he said.
That is a claim Donald Trump himself has made in trying to make the case against his own impeachment. Earlier this year, after Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to illegal campaign contributions for paying off women claiming they had affairs with Trump, the president broached the topic of impeachment.
In an appearance on Fox & Friends , Donald Trump said that the United States economy would be plunged into chaos if he were impeached.
“I will tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor,” Trump said (via AFP ). “You would see – you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse.”
Republican leaders need to either pressure Trump to resign or join calls for his impeachment, @tomfriedman writes https://t.co/Y5RGm5QYLt
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) December 25, 2018
Donald Trump could face trouble on many fronts in 2019. Legal experts and political opponents said that Trump could have been charged with a felony for his part in the hush money scheme, but likely will not face indictment due to the Justice Department’s policy against indicting a sitting president. The results from the Russia investigation are also expected in the coming months, which would likely show whether Trump colluded with Russia or committed obstruction of justice in his actions to stymie the investigation.
