Fox Business host Charles Payne said on Monday that the rise of socialist Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primary is in part to blame for the stock market taking a massive dive today.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 1,000 points—its biggest point decline in more than two years; the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note approached a record low; and gold prices climbed for the eighth straight session to a seven-year high.
“I will say the epicenter of this, today’s specific sell-off, is not China,” Payne said. “I think it’s Italy. I was watching really closely almost every single moment over the weekend, when Italy started to report these cases. It felt haphazard, it felt confusing.”
Fox News co-host Ed Henry asked Payne, “Is the sell off all coronavirus or is this the first time in the markets are open since Bernie Sanders took control of the Democratic battle?”
“The Bernie factor is finally rearing its head in the stock market,” Payne responded. “Molina Health, one of the biggest health insurance in this country, is down 8%. United Health is down over 6%. Anthem is down 5%. Hospital stocks are getting hit. Drug stocks are down 4%”
Co-host Sandra Smith pressed, “you attribute that to Bernie Sanders?”
“There’s absolutely no doubt,” Payne responded. These stocks got hammered when Elizabeth Warren was in the lead and when she had her biggest point of leading in the polls all of these stocks were under an extreme amount of pressure.”
Payne noted that as Warren’s candidacy began to tank that those companies rebounded in the stock market.
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Billionaire philanthropist Leon Cooperman warned last week that Sanders posed greater threat to the economy than the coronavirus.
“In all honesty, I don’t have any insight into the coronavirus beyond what everyone else has, but I assume, with all the great minds of the world focused on this problem, that in three or four months this will become resolved, much the way SARS and the Ebola virus were dealt with,” Cooperman said. “Bernie Sanders, if you listened to his proposals, it’s only a six-trillion-dollar annual deficit; I think he’s misrepresenting himself; he is not a socialist, but he’s rather a communist, and there’s a difference between socialists and communists. Socialists advocate a redistribution of wealth; communists advocate nationalizing the means of production and tearing down the house that wealth has built.”
Cooperman concluded, “All you have to do is read The Wall Street Journal this past Saturday on Bernie to understand what he stands for. And the fact that he’s doing so well in the polls is troublesome. I just hope the country is not prepared to elect a communist or socialist; if we do, then I think that the market is in store for a big problem.”