As the market dips ever lower, the White House’s top economic authority offers the same advice: Buy low!
Former CNBC pundit Larry Kudlow kept up that advice on Monday as markets continued to plunge all around him.
“To me, when you see these big dips, these big drops, they’re buying opportunities if you’re a long-term investor,” he told reporters from the White House driveway, according to a pool report.
During the same press gaggle, he paraphrased, purposefully or not, the late Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) infamous pre-recession prediction: “The fundamentals of the economy are strong.”
Earlier Monday in an interview on CNBC, where he used to be a contributor, Kudlow said “for long-term investors, I think it affords a great opportunity to buy.”
It was similar to the advice Kudlow has given multiple times over the past month as the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe and sent the global economy hurtling toward recession. Each time, Kudlow’s advice has implied the market is at its bottom.
On Feb. 24, as COVID-19 cases grew outside of China, Kudlow told The Washington Post that long term investors “should seriously consider buying these dips.”
The market kept dropping. The next day, Feb. 25, he said the same thing.
“The virus story is not going to last forever,” he told CNBC. “To me, if you are an investor out there and you have a long-term point of view I would suggest very seriously taking a look at the market, the stock market, that is a lot cheaper than it was a week or two ago.”
In the same interview, Kudlow falsely said that the World Health Organization director general had urged people to not “overreact” — something the director general had not said. Kudlow also claimed, referring to COVID-19, “We have contained this. I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight.”
There were 53 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States at the time; that number is now past 4,000, according to Johns Hopkins’ count.
“The human tragedy side, difficult, horrible,” Kudlow added. “The economic side, there is no tragedy in the United States. China is going to take an awfully big hit.”
Earlier this month, on March 6, Kudlow kept up the same investment advice on CNBC.
“Long term investors should think seriously about buying these dips,” he said.
The known COVID-19 cases in the United States numbered around 230 at the time.
“I think it is relatively contained,” he said.
