U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville on Monday attempted to rationalize the plunge in stock prices as the result of an “over-bloated” market instead of President Donald Trump’s tariff policies.
“The only problem you have with these tariffs, there’s always a scoreboard. And that’s gonna be the stock market,” the Republican senator from Alabama said during a Fox Business appearance.
“And people are looking at the stock market like, ‘Hey, this is like the highest it’s gonna continue for months and months and months.’ That’s not gonna happen. We were probably over-bloated with the stock market here for a while,” Tuberville told Larry Kudlow.
“We went up quite a bit. But at the end of the day it’s about fairness, it’s about having fair tariffs,” said Alabama’s senior senator.
The S&P 500 dropped 2.7% to drag it close to 9% below its all-time high, which was set just last month.
At one point, the S&P 500 was down 3.6% and on track for its worst day since 2022.
That’s when the highest inflation in generations was shredding budgets and raising worries about a possible recession that ultimately never came.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 890 points, or 2.1%, after paring an earlier loss of more than 1,100, while the Nasdaq composite skidded by 4%.
It was the worst day yet in a scary stretch where the S&P 500 has swung more than 1%, up or down, seven times in eight days because of Trump’s on -and- off -again tariffs.
The worry is that the whipsaw moves will either hurt the economy directly or create enough uncertainty to drive U.S. companies and consumers into an economy-freezing paralysis.
Tuberville said he was confident that Trump’s team and the tariffs will improve the economy.
“President Trump has put together a smart group of people that understand a lot about the dollar and a lot about foreign currency … at the end of the day, it’s all going to work out and it’s all going to work out better for the United States of America,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.