President Donald Trump has again opened his mouth to inject more uncertainty into the trade war with China, unsettling markets.
Friday saw him say while walking to a helicopter, that he was not ready to make a deal with China and even called a September round of trade talks into question,
Investors went all fear and loathing again and down went Wall Street, reviving concerns on financial markets that the bilateral dispute is unlikely to end anytime soon.
For the week US shares fell 0.5%, Eurozone shares lost 1.4%, Japanese shares fell 1.9% and Chinese shares lost 3%.
Trump also added to his confusion by saying that the United States would not do business with Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies, only to have a White House official later clarified that he was referring to a ban on US government purchases of Huawei equipment, not requests for sales by US companies, which are still being assessed (according to Reuters reports).
The Dow closed 90.75 points, or 0.3%, lower at 26,287.44, with the index turning positive at one point during the session, erasing a roughly 280-point plunge.
The S&P 500 index slipped 19.44 points, or 0.7%, to end at 2,918.65 while the Nasdaq Composite Index lost 1% to 7,959.14, off 80.02 points.
All three benchmarks were down at least 1% at Friday’s nadir.
For the week, the Nasdaq lost 0.6%, the S&P 500 lost 0.5%, while the Dow ended the week off 0.8%.
The week was marked by wild swings in all indexes. Reuters pointed out that last week’s Wall Street volume was also the biggest weekly total of the year, exceeding 41 billion shares.
