- The president’s social media posts could be more important than the actual economic data, according to a JPMorgan portfolio manager. Consider: Trump’s post announcing the 90-day tariff grace period fueled a stock market rebound, and his posts chastising the head of the central bank sent shares spiraling. Still, the data matters and moves markets, too.
Market swings sort of feel like a new normal.
But the president’s social media could be more impactful than the actual economic data, not too different from his first term.
“We’re one Truth Social post away from being up or down 5% every day,” JPMorgan portfolio manager Bill Eigen said on CNBC Friday morning, before April’s job report came out. “The data is almost secondary at this point.”
For example, stocks tumbled last month after President Donald Trump posted that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s termination couldn’t come fast enough and ramped up his criticism of the head of the central bank.
Not to mention, markets surged when he announced the 90-day tariff grace period to talk trade deals via his social media. That followed similar whiplash after some of his earlier posts on tariffs. Bloomberg reported some investors have adopted a 72-hour rule for the president’s social media posts, where they wait three days before making moves to see if he walks something back.
In February, a JPMorgan study found Trump sent out fewer market-moving posts than his first time around. Still, 10% of what he had posted caused market moves, and it was beginning to pick up, Reuters reported. The White House did not respond to a request for comment; JPMorgan did not comment further.
Before Trump was even sworn in, he was pushing currencies around via his social media messages. In late November last year, after he was re-elected, he took to Truth Social to tell everyone tariffs on Mexico and Canada were coming—the Canadian dollar and Mexican peso weakened against the dollar on the back of the threat a day later.
The uncertainty surrounding Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff policy has made markets volatile since he was elected. Still, it maybe wasn’t all bad. Eigen, the head of the Absolute Return and Opportunistic Fixed Income team at JPMorgan Asset Management, called mid-April “fun,” and said he was sitting on liquidity. But there is probably more volatility ahead.
“The problem we’re dealing with right now is that…the correct path is very often the most tortured,” Eigen said. The administration wants to get trade deals done, “but it’s going to be a tortuous path—and I don’t think the market is quite done being tortured yet,” he said.
To be clear, the data still moves markets. Stock markets cheered the better-than-expected jobs report that showed employers hired steadily, and the unemployment rate was unchanged.
The S&P 500 rose 1.51%, the Nasdaq jumped 1.67%, and the Dow increased 1.38%, at writing. On the other hand, markets plummeted on the news of the gross domestic product drop earlier this week.