Wall Street’s Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index was on track to rise for the first time in nine trading sessions on Wednesday, having this week chalked up its longest consecutive streak of down days since the 2011 eurozone crisis.
Late afternoon in London, the bluechip index was marginally higher on the day but it was still nursing a near 1 per cent loss for the month of March, largely bruised by doubts that some of Donald Trump’s policies around tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks might not be put into action.
Promises of major financial reform had in recent months supported the dollar and propelled major stocks indices to record highs, but details of exactly how the US President plans to implement these sweeping change have been limited so far.
On Friday, Mr Trump’s flagship healthcare bill failed to secure enough support from Republicans, denting confidence around some of the President’s other promised policies.
“Is the ‘Trump Bump’ morphing into a ‘Trump Dump’?” asked Geraud Charpin, a portfolio manager at global asset management group BlueBay.
He said that one of the main risks on investors’ radars in recent weeks had been that “the new administration cannot work with congress and fails to deliver anything substantial.”
Josh Mahony, a market analyst at IG, said that a “substantial degree of scepticism” had emerged “over whether Donald Trump would actually keep to his words on some of the plans he set out when trying to win the Presidency”.
He said that the “first real doubts have crept in over whether we will actually see Trump’s policies come to fruition”.
“We are now realising that despite a clean sweep for the Republicans in Congress, passing such divisive laws may not be as easy as first thought,” Mr Mahony said.
