While it probably won’t have the same legs as “covfefe,” his famously baffling tweet in 2017 that spawned a tsunami of mocking memes, President Trump lit Twitter up on Thursday with a pitch about workers’ 409k performance on his watch.
While noting new market highs, he also implied a 50% gain was an underperformance, and rhetorically asked what investors are doing wrong (while including another typo):
“STOCK MARKET AT ALL-TIME HIGH! HOW ARE YOUR 409K’S DOING? 70%, 80%, 90% up? Only 50% up! What are you doing wrong?”
The response from critics, as expected, was swift and merciless:
Trump deleted the tweet soon after and replaced it with a corrected version:
“STOCK MARKET AT ALL-TIME HIGH! HOW ARE YOUR 401K’S DOING? 70%, 80%, 90% up? Only 50% up! What are you doing wrong?” — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2020
‘Volfefe’ Index
The president’s tweets are so prevalent many wonder about their potential market impact and how much they help or hurt.
J.P. Morgan went so far as to release its Volfefe Index last September, which aims to quantify the market impact of the Commander-in-Chief’s social media musings.
Analyzing bond market movement and interest rate volatility, J.P. Morgan analysts found that the index “explains a measurable fraction of the moves in implied rate volatility for 2-year and 5-year Treasurys,” CNBC reported.
However, out of about 4,000 non-retweets occurring during market hours from 2018 to the present, only 146 moved the market.
Marital Bliss
The president often uses 401k performance as an everyman-proxy for the nation’s overall economic health.
He recently upped the ante beyond financial growth to include marital bliss, mentioning it as a reason he deserves another term.
Speaking at a rally in Lexington, Kentucky in November, Trump made direct ties to family harmony and his economic policies.
“People tell me that their wives, their husbands all of a sudden they’ve been running the 401ks for years and they totally lost respect for, let’s say the husband, totally lost respect—now they think he’s a financial genius because he’s up 74 percent. She says: ‘Darling I love you; you are the most incredible, brilliant financial mind.’”
Targeting his Democrat opponents and the damage he alleges they’ll do, he added:
“And you know what, if the Democrats get in that’s not going down by 50 percent, that’s going down to nothing, it’s going to be worthless, it’s going to be worthless. You’ll have a depression the likes of which you’ve never seen. Mark my words. But hopefully, we don’t have to even think about it.”
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
