Just 24 Hours After Saying Impeachment Is Hurting Stock Market, Donald Trump Boasts Stock Market Is ‘Up BIG!’
On Thursday, at the same time that the House of Representatives was voting to formalize rules for the impeachment process against him, Donald Trump took to his Twitter account. Impeachment, he warned, “is hurting our Stock Market,” adding that “The Do Nothing Democrats don’t care!” as quoted by The Washington Post.
But approximately 24 hours later — after the impeachment resolution passed the House on a largely party-line vote — Trump was back on Twitter, this time with a sharply contradictory message.
“Stock Market up BIG!” Trump declared. “Record highs for S&P 500 and NASDAQ. Enjoy!”
Trump made no mention of his earlier warning that the impeachment “hoax,” as he called it, would hurt the markets.
According to a Yahoo! Finance report on Friday, the day’s early stock market gains were connected to the release of October’s jobs report.
The United States economy added 120,000 jobs during October, according to the numbers cited by Yahoo! Finance reporter Emily McCormick. That figure was well above the 85,000 that had been anticipated by a consensus of economists, and sparked optimism among investors. Their sunny outlook was also reflected by investor moves into U.S. treasury yields, and a decline in gold prices, Yahoo! reported.
Former Republican member of Congress David Jolly noted the contradictory Trump tweets on his own Twitter account.
Yesterday. Today. pic.twitter.com/8xjnEOtDNa
— David Jolly (@DavidJollyFL) November 1, 2019
Trump offered no evidence that the impeachment proceedings are connected to stock market performance. Last week, however, top Wall Street investment firm Raymond James predicted that the stock market would rally if Trump simply resigned.
With Mike Pence assuming the presidency following a hypothetical Trump resignation, a report by the company stated, the stock market would benefit from the more stable and predictable style that the current vice president exhibits, and would likely bring to the Oval Office.
The effect of the impeachment process on the stock markets is not well-documented. Data shows, however, that there is an identifiable factor exerting a clear influence on the movement of the markets — Trump’s Twitter account.
According to a report in September by the financial publication Barron’s, the stock market responds directly to Trump’s tweets, or at least to the frequency with which he tweets.
The magazine’s reporters analyzed approximately 14,000 Trump tweets from 2016 — when he emerged as the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination — to the end of August 2019. They found that on days when Trump’s Twitter feed is relatively quiet, the stock market is more likely to rise.
On days when Trump tweeted no more than five times, the markets showed an “average positive return of 0.13 percent.” That is more than six times as much as on an average day.
But on days when Trump was especially prolific with his tweeting, posting to Twitter 20 times or more, markets dropped an average of 0.03 percent.
