Trump Abandons Plans for Infrastructure Advisory Council

"The stock market has a great tendency to look at geopolitical or political events, have a small pullback and then just shrug its shoulders", said Burns McKinney, chief investment officer in the Dallas office of Allianz Global Investors. Also weighing on the greenback was today's terrorist attack in Barcelona, Spain which resulted in a number of casualties. The Dow Jones industrial average tumbled 1.2 percent to 21,750.73.

The S&P 500 plunged 1.5 percent to 2,430.04, the biggest decline since May. "The only way to beat the loud and angry voices of hate is to meet them with louder and more reasonable voices", he said in a video for ATTN, and that includes Trump, who, "as president of this great country", has "a moral responsibility to send an unequivocal that you won't stand for hate and racism". The latest cause for concern was speculation over the possible departure of National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn.

The White House declined to tell reporters if Trump and Cohn talked about the president's remarks, telling the press pool, "We're not going to comment on internal conversations". After all, there is general agreement that tax reform will pass in some form.

Tokyo was also more than one percent down by the break, as the Nikkei also struggled in the face of the renewed strength of the yen against the greenback.

"This immediately evokes the Groucho Marx quip about not wanting to be a member of a club that would have him as a member", Mr Attrill noted.

In the latest USA economic data, a Labour Department showed that initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 232,000 for the week ended August 12.

Shanghai, Sydney and Seoul all fell, just as Asia-Pacific stocks had clawed back much of their losses from last week's slump over fears of military clashes between North Korea and the USA, fuelled by angry threats from both sides.

In currencies, the euro fell off from a near 2½-year high against the dollar after a summary from the European Central Bank's July 20 meeting showed officials were concerned about an "overshooting" in the currency.

The ECB is anxious the euro is overshooting against other currencies, which makes exports more expensive.

Japan's Nikkei slipped 0.1 per cent to 19,702.63, weighed down by a stronger yen as the United States dollar wilted and shrugging off data showing the country's exports rose for an eighth straight month in July.

"Crude oil prices edge higher as conflicting data continues to push and pull prices", Ms Murphy wrote in a note to clients. In 2011, a highly dramatic debt ceiling "crisis", in which Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling until it seemed to become immediately necessary, led Standard & Poor to downgrade the credit rating of US and generated considerable market volatility.

In futures trade here, the ASX SPI 200 Index was down almost 1 per cent, which indicates the local market will be in the red today.