Omega Advisors CEO Leon Cooperman continued to express Wall Street’s panic over an Elizabeth Warren presidency when he said that “They won’t open the stock market if Elizabeth Warren is the next president.”
At the Delivering Alpha conference this week, Cooperman sounded the alarm about a Warren win by saying “There’s unquestionably a shift to the left in this country,” and adding “They won’t open the stock market if Elizabeth Warren is the next president.”
And in a later CNBC interview, he revised his panic down only slightly, predicting that a Warren presidency would result in a catastrophic drop in the stock market.
He began by walking back his earlier comment, saying “When I said they wouldn’t open the market if Elizabeth Warren won, my way of just saying the market would be very vulnerable.”
But when pressed on Warren’s effect on the market later in the interview, Cooperman predicted her presidency would result in a catastrophic 25 percent drop in stocks.
“They’ll open the market if Elizabeth Warren wins, it’ll just open a hell of a lot lower,” Cooperman said.
Asked how much lower, said “Right now the market is assuming Donald Trump is re-elected. If it looks like Elizabeth Warren is a credible, or Bernie Sanders is a credible opponent to Trump, the market will not be higher, it’ll be lower.”
He added that “I
Based on today’s market, that would be a drop of almost 7,000 points. Under the presidency of Barack Obama, the market went up 148 percent.
Asked about former Vice President Joe Biden‘s potential effect on the market, Cooperman said “Well he’s more of a centrist, I could live with his policies, the question is how strong he is and whether he’s willing to resist the progressive in his party, and whether he gets denomination. But he’s okay.”
Warren has recently been the subject of several viral freak-outs by Wall Street journalists and CEOs.
Watch the clips above, via CNBC.