'Plunge Protection Team' Holds Emergency Meeting as Trump Chaos Sparks Fears of Another Financial Crash

The deeply harmful government shutdown over President Donald Trump’s demand for billions in border wall funding continued with no agreement in sight.

From his vacation spot in Cabo San Lucas, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Sunday sent markets tumbling with a bizarre Twitter statement assuring the public that there is absolutely no reason to believe Wall Street is about to collapse—a move one reporter described as the “financial equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater.”

“The incompetence of this administration keeps eclipsing what was previously imaginable.”
—Ryan Grim, The Intercept

And, holed up in the White House instead of his Mar-a-Lago resort on Christmas Eve, Trump fired off a tweet-storm blaming the Federal Reserve for what’s shaping up to be the stock market’s worst December since the Great Depression.

These chaotic and anxiety-inducing circumstances culminated on Monday with Mnuchin holding an emergency call with members of the so-called “Plunge Protection Team,” a group that includes top officials from the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The Christmas Eve call, as CBS News put it, summoned the “ghost of 2008,” as the team—formally called the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets—also convened during the 2008 financial crisis, which ultimately wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth, sparked a massive foreclosure crisis, and inflicted harm to ordinary Americans that persists to this day.

The specifics of Monday’s call have not yet been made public.

While noting that the U.S. financial system is not on the brink of collapse, analysts argued that the incompetence of the Trump White House at every level—demonstrated repeatedly over the holiday weekend—could help drag it to that dangerous point.

“Is Steve Mnuchin… trying to create a financial crisis?” asked Slate‘s Jordan Weissmann in response to the Treasury Secretary’s alarming statement on Sunday.