Even with the U.S. economy slowing down and some economists predicting that the United States will be in a recession in 2020, President Donald Trump continues to insist that the economy is in great shape and that he is responsible. Trump often uses Twitter to address financial matters, and JPMorgan Chase has created an index that measures the effect that Trump’s tweets have on the markets.
Emma Newburger, in a report for CNBC’s website, offers some data from JPMorgan’s index (which it has named the Volfefe Index). Newburger, using JPMorgan data, reports that since Trump was elected in November 2016, he “has averaged more than ten tweets a day to his nearly 64 million followers — roughly 14,000 total over that period associated with his personal account, of which more than 10,000 occurred after the 2017 inauguration.”
Newburger writes that according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, days in which Trump tweets a lot are “associated with negative stock market returns.” But the CNBC reporter also notes that even though Trump’s tweets “can disrupt markets with sudden attacks on China trade or the Federal Reserve,” he “has still been good for the stock market overall. The Dow is up 42% since the 2016 presidential election and 31% since his inauguration.”
Newburger also observes that “out of about 4000 non-retweets occurring during market hours from 2018 to the present, only 146 moved the market.”
JPMorgan Chase’s Volfefe Index notes when Trump is most likely to tweet. The president’s heaviest Twitter activity comes “around noon to 2 p.m.,” Newburger reports.