White House Washington DC Presidential Election

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Here’s how stocks see the presidential race

It’s been a tumultuous election season and tonight’s debate could shake up the race — and the markets.

9/10/24 10:54AM

The stock market is almost dead flat early Tuesday, ahead of the tonight’s presidential debate between Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican candidate former President Donald Trump.

Investors good have reason to sit on their hands for the moment and see how it plays out. It’s been a tumultuous election season that has involved the cataclysmic debate performance of President Biden on June 27, the attempted assassination of Trump on July 13, and Biden’s decision to drop out of the race on July 21.

Polling and prediction markets both have the election as a dead heat, with many seeing tonight’s debate — set for 9 p.m. ET in Philadelphia — as perhaps one of the few remaining events before November that could potentially shake up a race that seems to be solidifying.

Gauging the state of the race by the looking at the stock market is always a fraught exercise, given the plethora of company specific and economy-wide elements that can impact share prices.

But Goldman Sachs thematic baskets of stocks that stand to benefit from either GOP or Democratic policies seem to confirm the topsy-turvy nature of the race since the Biden-Trump debate.

The GOP basket — weighted toward companies such as steel firms that would benefit from steep tariffs Trump has promised — opened up a lead in the aftermath of the first debate and the assassination attempt of Trump.

But that lead collapsed once Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, with the Democratic policy basket — weighted toward solar firms and home builders, among others — taking the lead.

Both baskets took a bath with the steep 10% sell-off that hit the market in early August. But the Democratic convention in Chicago seemed to give the Democratic basket a lift by a good four percentage points or so.

Whether that changes drastically in the aftermath of tonight’s debate could shed a bit of light of who won, at least in the eyes of traders.

Jon Keegan16h

Trump’s deal offering top Nvidia chips to China was nixed at last minute, the WSJ reports

Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, really wants to sell the chipmaker’s most powerful Blackwell GPUs to China. He almost had his way.

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, President Trump was ready to put Blackwell chips on the negotiating table for his meeting with Chinese President Xi to seek relief from China’s decision to block crucial rare earth exports to the US.

But according to the report, Trump advisers presented a unified front and were able to dissuade him from giving up the most powerful chips to China at the last minute. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer were among those opposed to the chip deal. After the meeting, Trump said he did not talk with Xi about Nvidia’s “super duper” chips.

Reportedly those opposed to the deal cited national security concerns, as well as wanting to keep a competitive edge as China seeks to challenge the US’s current dominance of the AI industry.

Exclusive | Trump Officials Torpedoed Nvidia’s Push to Export AI Chips to China

Reportedly those opposed to the deal cited national security concerns, as well as wanting to keep a competitive edge as China seeks to challenge the US’s current dominance of the AI industry.

Walt Hickey

shutdown watch

10/21/25

Traders are getting more and more pessimistic about the government shutdown ending any time soon

The market expects the shutdown to last well into November.

Jon Keegan

10/10/25

OpenAI’s internal Slack messages could cost it billions in copyright suit

Authors and publishers suing OpenAI over copyright infringement were granted access to internal OpenAI communications about the deletion of a pirated books dataset, and now want to review attorney communications.

Max Knoblauch

10/9/25

US corporate spending on private flights for executives has ballooned in recent years

The median expense spent by America’s largest companies on air travel jumped 66% from 2020 to 2024.

Claire Yubin Oh10/1/25

OK, so when was the longest shutdown in US history?

The US government officially shut down at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday after senators failed to agree on a last-minute funding bill. Though initially shrugging off the threat of a shutdown during yesterday’s session, stocks were mildly in the red on Wednesday as investors reacted to what is now the 11th shutdown in the government’s history.

Until this latest shutdown, there had been 20 government funding gaps experienced since 1976 — though not all ended in a full shutdown, with full closure averted in half of those cases.

Indeed, prior to the 1980s, funding gaps didn’t typically have major effects on government operations, with agencies continuing to operate on the basis that the funding would come eventually. However, a more stringent interpretation of the rules led to a stricter appropriations process from the early 1980s onward, with many subsequent funding gaps resulting in a shutdown of affected agencies (unless the gaps were quickly fixed or occurred over a weekend).

Obviously, the duration of the latest shutdown is still unclear, but it will continue until Congress passes a funding bill — most likely via a “continuing resolution,” which has ended every shutdown since 1990. Data analyzed by USAFacts suggest that it might not be a one- or two-day affair, as funding gaps have lengthened in recent years.

Government shutdown patterns — Sherwood News

Indeed, the last shutdown, which began in December 2018, ended up becoming the longest in history, at a whopping 34 days. By the time the government reopened in January 2019, about $3 billion (in 2019 dollars) had been wiped from the GDP in Q4, per data from the Congressional Budget Office, with approximately $18 billion in “federal discretionary spending” delayed over the roughly five-week stretch.

Here’s how stocks see the presidential race

More Power

Trump’s deal offering top Nvidia chips to China was nixed at last minute, the WSJ reports

Exclusive | Trump Officials Torpedoed Nvidia’s Push to Export AI Chips to China

OK, so when was the longest shutdown in US history?

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