Gary Cohn, former White House National Economic Council Director on today's market rout

Gary Cohn, former president and CEO of Goldman Sachs and former White House National Economic Council Director: We 100% won't get stimulus before the election.

Video Transcript

GARY COHN: I think it's a combination a lot of issues, and I think you touched on a couple of them. Number one, we've clearly seen the COVID virus numbers come back up, as predicted. I think we're starting to see the fall to winter spikes that people predicted starting to come back into real numbers. And we saw some of those numbers come back over the weekend.

Number two, fiscal stimulus-- you know, last week, we thought-- or we were being told-- that we're making enormous progress with fiscal stimulus, that Secretary Mnuchin and Speaker Pelosi were very, very close, we were on the verge. I think now, eight days away from an election, no one thinks we're going to have fiscal stimulus till after an election. I think that's 100% probability we won't.

And you know, the market's been fairly volatile as we go into the election here. And we're starting to see a little bit more volatility around the election. We're starting to see a little bit more movement in polls. And you take all three of those together, the three unknowns, and we know that the market does not like unpredictability.

So we've just thrown more unpredictability at the market, and we've seen a little bit of a retracement here. I don't think this is a major retracement. We're sort of back to where we were a couple of weeks ago.

We're still in a fairly positive uptrend, and business is still pretty good. We've got some pretty important earnings numbers coming out in the next few days in the tech sector. And so far, earnings for the quarter have been pretty good.