Wall Street's rout is a natural correction and not caused by any particular factors, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday, after his boss Donald Trump hung blame for the losses on US interest-rate increases. The fall in US stocks on Wednesday triggered a global sell-off as investors fretted repeated rounds of interest rate hikes and the ongoing US-China trade war.
But Mnuchin said in media interviews on the Indonesia resort island of Bali, where the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are meeting, that "this is not a systemic issue". "Markets are not efficient and markets move in both directions and at times they overshoot in both directions," he told Bloomberg News on the sidelines of the forum.
"The fundamentals of the US economy continue to be extremely strong. I think that's why the stock market has performed as well as it has." "The fact that there's somewhat of a correction given how much the market has gone up is not particularly surprising," he said.