As election results rolled in, global and futures markets responded to the surprisingly close contest by plummeting, with the Dow dropping nearly 800 points. Follow along here for continuing updates on how the world financial markets are responding to the election of Donald Trump as 45th president of the United States.
While the U.S. election was still being decided on Tuesday night, markets in Asia took a dive during active trading as Donald Trump pulled ahead of projected-winner Hillary Clinton.
But markets in Asia bounced back this morning: An hour into trading, the Nikkei is up 6 percent, wiping out losses from yesterday. Stocks in Hong Kong and Shanghai have also recovered: Both the Hang Seng and Shanghai Composite have soared pass yesterday’s losses. (An odd sidenote: a stock in China which sounded like “Trump Wins Big” rallied while another stock which sounded like “Aunt Hillary” tumbled as votes were still being counted.)
It’s worth watching how investors in China will react to the actual Trump presidency. After all, the candidate has suggested that China’s economic relationship with the U.S. might get a lot more complicated once he takes office. During the course of his presidential campaign, Trump accused China of devaluing its currency (a claim that has been debunked) and unfairly taking manufacturing jobs away from Americans. Trump has also suggested imposing a 45 percent tariff on Chinese-made goods in order to reduce the trade deficit and bring jobs stateside, which would create a trade war between the two nations and undoubtedly affect China’s economic growth.
Reuters reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping congratulated Trump in a message earlier today, stating that he’s looking forward to working with Trump to “uphold the principles of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation." For now, stocks in China, like those in the U.S., seem accepting of the impending Trump administration.
At the end of trading hours on Wednesday, it certainly seems that investors have digested Trump’s surprise victory in the U.S. Presidential election.
The Dow, S&P 500, and NASDAQ all rallied back from precipitous drops in the futures markets, with each closing up by at least 1 percent. The reversal was swift and intense—for the S&P the bounce back was largest since the days of the 2008 banking crisis. The Dow closed up 257 points, after diving 800 points last night in futures trading. Many analysts are attributing the market’s fast recovery to the tone of Trump’s late night acceptance speech, along with the potential benefits for Wall Street a Trump presidency could hold. Though Wall Street was expecting a Clinton win, the numbers seem to indicate that it is just as welcoming to the Trump presidency.
Asian markets open in just a few hours, and their performance tonight will either validate election night panic in emerging markets (the Nikkei plunged 5 percent, while the Hang Seng fell by 2 percent), or evaporate in the face of U.S. investor confidence.
DeVry Education Group is up 9 percent in today’s trading; Apollo Education Group, the company that owns several for-profit institutions—including the University of Phoenix—is up 7 percent; Bridgepoint Education (which was forced to forgive $24 million in student debt by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) up 17 percent; and Strayer Education (one of the most successful for-profit colleges) is up 12 percent.
The premise for investor confidence is that for-profit colleges—which have come under intense scrutiny in recent years by The Department of Education for fraudulent marketing, bad results, and saddling students with student-loan debt—might enjoy looser regulatory oversight once Trump becomes President. Afterall, Trump University, which shuttered in 2010, was a for-profit education company. Before Trump is sworn in next year, he will appear in court just after Thanksgiving as a witness in a class-action civil trial over alleged fraud at Trump University.
Bloombergreports that the billionaire investor Carl Icahn—a long time Trump supporter—left the president-elect’s victory party in the wee hours of the morning to bet $1 billion on the U.S. stock market.
Icahn’s take was that the 100-point drop in the S&P 500 was a temporary and irrational reaction that would soon reverse itself. And it looks like he was right, near the close of trading, the S&P was up more than 1 percent—the largest reversal for the index since the 2008 crisis.
As Rupert Neate of The Guardian notes, there are secondary market winners given the outcome of last night’s election: private prisons and oil companies.
The biggest corporate winners from Trump's victory. Private prisons and oil companies pic.twitter.com/xVjRgH1Ziz
The companies are soaring as analysts reckon that Trump will row back on the Department of Justice’s ruling this summer to phase out privately run jails. The companies could benefit still further from Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants.
And what about oil?
During his campaign, Trump has pledged to implement what he calls an “America first energy plan.” That plan calls for total energy independence achieved by undoing President Obama’s executive actions meant to curb energy production or emissions in favor of more climate-friendly policies, more exploration of shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, and exploration of “clean coal”.
Conversely, Trump has said that he would reverse the current U.S. commitment to battle climate change, including pulling out of the Paris Agreement. My colleague Robinson Meyer wrote about the potential environmental consequences of a Trump presidency here, saying:
This could shatter the international consensus on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, similar to how the second Bush administration’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol effectively ended that treaty’s functional life within the United States. It could enable other countries to abandon their commitments and emit greenhouse gases at much higher rates.
While markets have rebounded broadly, there are still big winners and big losers today.
At the conclusion of this election, concerns over the diminished power of the second amendment have seemed to dissipate. With Americans no longer concerned that a Clinton presidency would mean stricter gun control laws, the sense of urgency causing some to stock up on arms may have eased, causing a drop in major gun manufacturing stocks, such as Smith and Wesson, which declined by more than 3.75 percent around 12:20pm.
Sectors whose stocks were poised for a decrease in regulation under a Trump presidency —particularly large pharmaceutical organizations—climbed on Wednesday. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies have been cautious of a Clinton-presidency, based on her campaign promises that she would dramatically rein in drug prices. At 12:30 p.m, Bayer had surged more than 4 percent, while shares of Pfizer increased by more than 7.5 percent and GlaxoSmithKline was up more than 3 percent.
On Monday, world markets surged ahead on the projection that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would narrowly capture the presidency.
U.S. indicators—the Dow, the Nasdaq, and the S&P 500—rose 2 percent on forecasts predicting a Clinton victory.
But as the tides began to change last night—with Donald Trump pulling an eventual upset to become the U.S. president-elect—the market began to react. For a variety of reasons, markets don’t always respond well to uncertainty. The market shifts were somewhat predictable: the peso plunged to a record low, U.S. futures dived, Asian markets—particularly the Nikkei which dropped 5 percent by close—also dived, while gold rallied big. Analysts noted that the volatility seen last night was much greater than following the surprising result of the Brexit vote earlier this year.
This is not the outcome investors anticipated, but U.S. markets have since recovered: all three indices are surging ahead gaining nearly 1 percent by noon.
So why are the markets worried? First of all, the policy statements of Mr Trump have been both vague and erratic—on issues such as trade, foreign policy, the independence of the Federal Reserve and even the commitment to repay Treasury bonds in full. What is hard to know is how serious his policy proposals might be, and how much Congress would allow him to enact. He has more freedom in foreign policy areas than in the domestic arena. That is why emerging markets might take the greatest hit.
I spent 10 months working at the institution because I thought I could help protect it. What I observed there is far worse than the public knows.
On the day I was laid off from the Kennedy Center, I felt a little like Dolley Madison saving the Stuart portrait of Washington before the British sacked the capital. I was the staffer in charge of the artworks in the building. A crucial difference is that my institution, unlike the White House in 1814, had been on fire for months.
About a year elapsed between the moment President Trump took over the Kennedy Center in early 2025 and his declaration this past February that he’d decided to shut down the nation’s cultural center for two years. In between, we had seen artist cancellations, shrinking audiences, firings of old staffers and influxes of new ones—a lot of drama, just not onstage. The date Trump announced for the closure was July 4, the country’s 250th birthday, an event that I had been hired to help commemorate as the institution’s first curator of visual arts and special programming.
Maybe you’ve seen photos of Tehran in the 1970s, just before the Islamic Revolution: images of young women going to work in miniskirts, of couples making out in parks while wearing bell-bottoms, of people at pools in bikinis. It looks like Paris or Milan or Los Angeles. But in 1979 the revolution happened, and now Tehran looks like something from an earlier century.
Sometimes I think that our whole world has become kind of like that—going backwards in time. The religious movements thriving in today’s secularized age are the traditionalist ones that dissent from large parts of contemporary culture—not only the Shiite Islam of post-revolution Iran, but Orthodox Judaism and conservative Catholicism. Young Americans are flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches.
Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf.
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Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.
A shocking number of the president’s supporters have turned against him.
Tomas Montoya has sold festival foods—funnel cakes, burgers, hot dogs—across the American Southwest for years. But lately, business has been rough. Costs are up, so he’s increased his prices. Employees are begging for hours he can’t give them. In Arizona, where he lives, Montoya pays $6 a gallon to fill up his food trucks with diesel. This summer, he may have to skip the California leg of his festival route because fuel is even more expensive there.
“It’s Trump,” Montoya told us outside a popular Hispanic grocery store in Casa Grande, Arizona, much of which sits in one of the most evenly divided House districts in the country. Montoya voted for President Trump in 2024, but now, well, frustrated doesn’t begin to cover how he’s feeling. The president is bragging about the economy, even though everyone Montoya knows is hurting; he promised to stop wars, but started one in Iran. “When Trump opens his mouth, three-quarters of what he says is stories, lies,” Montoya said. He’s planning to vote in the midterm elections this fall. But he may not choose a Republican.
The vice president has decided he’s a more accomplished theologian than Leo XIV.
The Trump administration doesn’t seem to have many rules, but one of them is that once the president picks a fight, his posse must show up to support him, no matter how ill-advised the conflict. And few senior officials are more eager to back up the boss in every embarrassing beef than Vice President Vance, who recently seems to have decided that he, and not Pope Leo XIV, is the true arbiter of Catholic doctrine.
President Trump is personally angry with Leo because the pontiff has been deeply critical of America’s war of choice in Iran. Accordingly, Trump lashed out at His Holiness twice over the past few days. Vance might have seen this as a valuable opportunity to say nothing and let the storm pass; Leo, naturally, doesn’t seem to care all that much what Trump thinks. (As my colleague Liz Bruenig wrote, Leo answers to a higher authority.) Had the vice president remained silent, Trump might have moved on, and Vance, a relatively recent convert to Catholicism, would have been able to stay out of a dustup between his president and his spiritual leader.
A minimally speaking autistic man just wrote a best-selling book. Or did he?
Updated at 1:24 p.m. ET on April 16, 2026
On a recent morning at Rockefeller Center, NBC employees strolled through the crowd with copies of Upward Bound, the latest book-club pick from the Today show co-host Jenna Bush Hager. “It’s deeply heartfelt and moving,” Hager said, after holding up the debut novel from the 28-year-old Woody Brown, “and the reason it’s so authentic is that the author understands autism firsthand.”
That understanding is indeed profound. Brown’s autism is such that he can barely speak, and he communicates mostly by pointing to letters, one by one, on a laminated board. This is also how his novel, which is already a New York Times best seller, came to be. In the recorded interview that followed Hager’s introduction, Brown’s mother, Mary, sat beside him, holding the letter board and reading his tapped-out messages.
The president is on a losing streak, and even some of his aides are dismayed by his choices.
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You’ve heard the joke: The White House is going to start talking about the Epstein files to distract from how badly the Iran war is going.
Except that this reverse “Wag the dog” is based on bizarre truth: First Lady Melania Trump did bring the disgraced financier up, unprompted, late last week in an effort to distance herself from the scandal (in a move that, predictably, only shifted it back into the spotlight once again). Meanwhile, as negotiations with Iran stumble forward, the Strait of Hormuz is still in Tehran’s hands and now President Trump has authorized a risky naval blockade that will likely send prices soaring further. Moreover, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to fall, Republicans worry that both houses of Congress could be lost in November, and the president threw away a remarkable amount of geopolitical capital trying to support his now-defeated illiberal buddy Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Oh, and Trump deeply offended adherents of the world’s two largest religions in one week’s time.
In a new report, the World Bank thinks better of its old free-market absolutism.
How does a country get rich? For decades, the economics establishment generally agreed on a simple answer: Embrace free markets and avoid “industrial policy”—state-led efforts to shape what an economy produces—at all costs. No institution embodied this viewpoint, widely known as the “Washington Consensus,” quite like the World Bank. Established in 1944 to provide low-interest loans to developing countries, the bank soon became the intellectual center of development economics. In the 1990s, it took a hard stance against industrial policy, turning the concept almost into a taboo.
But now industrial policy is back, and it has a surprising new champion: the World Bank. A report issued last month argues that the bank’s previous stance had things backward: Government intervention, when done right, can actually be an essential ingredient of economic success. Industrial policy “should be considered in the national policy toolkit of all countries,” the report concludes.
Among the many reasons for Viktor Orbán’s defeat was the rural clubs where citizens relearned democratic habits.
In the days after Donald Trump won his second term, I called a handful of Hungarian political analysts to ask what the American future might look like. My impulse was not an original one; the analysts had been fielding many calls of this sort. Hungary seemed like a bellwether for the illiberal direction in which Trump said he was going to lead the United States. Over his decade and a half reign, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had rigged the electoral and legislative systems for his party’s benefit, come to control (directly or indirectly) 80 percent of the country’s media, and hobbled most independent institutions. But when I asked these Hungarians to give it to me straight, they started to tell me another story, about what was happening on “the islands.”
We’ve had Henry David Thoreau the environmentalist, the libertarian, the life coach. To understand his influence, think of him first as a dissident.
One afternoon in the summer of 1846, Henry David Thoreau left his hut near Walden Pond and walked into town to pick up a shoe he was having mended. He was stopped by the local tax collector, who nudged him for the umpteenth time about paying his poll tax—the dollar and a half that every man over the age of 20 had to pay annually, or else lose the right to vote. The tax collector, who wanted to clear his books, even offered to cover the bill, which hadn’t been paid for four years. But Thoreau refused, and he was taken to jail. The one night he spent in a second-floor cell overlooking his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, was not particularly dramatic. But it was clarifying. As an opponent of slavery, he understood that paying the tax would mean legitimizing a government “which is the slave’s government also,” he later wrote. He couldn’t do that, and so he didn’t.
