Wednesday's early trade: Cohn exit adds to Wall Street trade war fears

Wall Street's main indexes fell on Wednesday as investors worried the exit of staunch free trade supporter Gary Cohn from the White House made the imposition of hefty steel and aluminium tariffs and eruption of a global trade war more likely. The Dow fell as much as 1 percent at opening before trimming some of those losses as markets again debated how serious Donald Trump was about a protectionist shift that economists say could damage growth worldwide.
Playing in to that recovery was a Bloomberg interview in which White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who favours strong tariffs, said he was not a candidate to replace Cohn as Trump's chief economic adviser. "The market's gone up on that," said Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading in Chatham, New Jersey. "The market sees him (Navarro) as a very protectionist type. If he's not in the running the market seems to like that."
At 11:29 am ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 175.23 points, or 0.7 percent, at 24,708.89, the S&P 500 was down 13.03 points, or 0.48 percent, at 2,715.09 and the Nasdaq Composite was down 16.65 points, or 0.23 percent, at 7,355.35. Worries over the threat to global trade that US moves would represent have dominated Wall Street trading for almost a week.