Plunge Protection Team Holds “Market Resilience” Call After Monday’s Market Crash

The last time Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had a phone call with the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, better known as the Plunge Protection Team, was on Dec 24, 2018, or the day which has since become better known as the Christmas Eve massacre  and which just happened to be the low of the Q4 2018 mini bear markets. It spawned a tremendous rally which culminated in a full year return for 2019 of nearly 30% with zero earnings growth.

We bring this up because moments ago, moments ago we learned that in the past day, there was another phone call with the participants of the plunge protection team, which included Mnuchin, Fed Chairman Powell, New York Fed President Williams, as well as the heads of SEC, CFTC, OCC and FDIC, and during which “market conditions and resilience”, “economic disruptions” and “virus impact” were all discussed:

• MNUCHIN, POWELL, QUARLES, CLAYTON AMONG CALL PARTICIPANTS
• FINANCIAL MARKETS WORKING GROUP DISCUSSED VIRUS IMPACT
• FINANICAL MARKETS WORKING GROUP DISCUSSED MARKET CONDITIONS
• FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIR JEROME POWELL, MNUCHIN, AND OTHER FINANCIAL REGULATORY CHIEFS DISCUSSED “UPDATES ON THE RESILIENCE OF THE MARKETS AND THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF COVID-19”

While the details of the call have not yet been laid out, one can imagine what the topic was on the day the market suffered its biggest crash since the financial crisis.

Curiously, while the market had ramped to session highs earlier on a report that Trump had a great meeting with Senators, and there was “unity in the GOP party”, the PPT phone call report nudged markets off session highs, perhaps because it means – once again – that a fiscal stimulus agreement remains far away.