Seven weeks before President Donald Trump announced her departure from the Justice Department via social-media post, Attorney General Pam Bondi made a remark about the Dow Jones Industrial Average during a contentious hearing before the House Judiciary Committee that elicited laughter from Democrats and, later, a torrent of online comments and then memes.
Amid an exchange with House Democrats including Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland about her department’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein files and investigations, Bondi suddenly shifted to a discussion of the performance of the U.S. stock market.
“Because [of] Donald Trump … the Dow, the Dow right now, is over … the Dow is over 50,000 dol— … I don’t know why you’re laughing, you’re a great stock trader if I hear, Raskin, the Dow is over 50,000 right now, the S&P [500] at almost 7,000 and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming,” Bondi said, adding: “That’s what we should be talking about.”
“What does the Dow have to do with anything? That’s what they just asked,” she went on to exclaim, reporting that Democrats in the hearing room were laughing. “Are you kidding?”
At the time, many wondered whether Bondi might have inadvertently top-ticked the market. In retrospect, her remark, made on Feb. 11, has marked at least a local top, as Wall Street professionals would call it. Since the closing bell rang that day, the Dow DJIA has fallen by 7.5% to 46,370, as of afternoon trading on Thursday, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The blue-chip average registered a closing peak of 50,188.14 on Feb. 10, a day before Bondi’s testimony.
Joseph Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading, told MarketWatch that the comment immediately got people talking about whether Bondi had “jinxed” the market.
“Certainly it had nothing to do with the market selloff — it was just kind of one of those jinxes, if you want to call it that,” Saluzzi said. “It was like the magazine cover curse — as soon as that happened, it was like, ‘Oh, boy,’ and, sure enough, we’ve been down since.”
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At the time Bondi apparently sought to redirect questioning by a congressional panel charged with overseeing her department’s work toward a discussion of the U.S. equities market, the Dow indeed was riding high. Money, at the time, had been flowing away from previously highflying tech stocks like Broadcom AVGO, Nvidia NVDA and Microsoft MSFT and into “old economy” blue-chip names like Caterpillar CAT and McDonald’s MCD.
