Maria Bartiromo is in high demand at Fox News and Fox Business, where she’s been doing more appearances on the networks’ shows than normal as the stock market fluctuates in relation to coronavirus fears. In between some of those show hits, she sat down with TheWrap this week to explain why the fluctuations are a “foreign policy” issue and what, exactly, really causes them.
“This is as much a foreign policy story as it is an economic story,” the “Mornings With Maria” anchor said Tuesday, one day after U.S. stock markets sank, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average sinking 7% and the S&P 500 down 6.6% an hour into trading. She noted that the ups and downs of the market were about more than just coronavirus fears, and had plenty to do with oil prices and other unexpected factors, too.
“Okay, so the stock market trades on the expectation of earnings growth,” she continued, explaining that a person who buys stock in Apple likely does so because Apple has the potential to sell a large number of iPads and iPhones. “If you don’t have any flights going in and out of China, if you don’t have anybody working in these factory lines to produce the product — they’re home quarantined — then they can’t make the products then companies can’t sell the products … What does that mean for Apple’s bottom line? They’re not going to earn what you thought they were going to earn because they can’t sell the product. So, the growth story just changed.”
“The growth story is no longer in place, and that’s when investors start selling. So with the coronavirus situation now the whole question is, ‘Will the economy keep growing?’ Or will the economy slow down? Are we going to see a sharp slowdown, to the extent that companies can’t make the money that we thought they were gonna make because they can’t sell the products that they thought they were gonna make? I think this whole coronavirus has created a lot of lessons for us in America. The number-one lesson is America is way too reliant on foreign places to produce our goods,” she shared. Bartiromo cited not only goods like iPhones, but the very ingredients needed for prescription drugs.
It’s that mixture — Bartiromo’s ease of explaining the market combined with her unique opinions and analysis — that has her booked on shows back-to-back from morning until night.
“I am lucky because I love what I do,” she said. “I don’t think you could work really hard and be at work all the time and do work at the pace that I work if you didn’t love it because you would be miserable.”