💵 Finance: The $5 trillion fake news fluctuation

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• On February 22nd, we analysed the content in a video shared by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew thanking the U.S. president Donald Trump for pausing the ban on the app in the U.S. by 75 days. That pause has been extended by another 75 days. Read our original breakdown here.

💸 15 words in = $2.5 trillion out

Here’s what happened.

On Monday morning, White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett was asked live on Fox News whether President Donald Trump would initiate a 90-day pause (on all countries except China) on the tariffs he’s announced in the last 10 days. Hassett responded, ‘I think the president is going to decide what the president is going to decide’.

This variation of the classic Glomar Response, also called NCND (neither confirm nor deny) somehow got turned into a headline on X that Trump was definitely pausing tariffs for 90 days (spoiler: this eventually happened, but only later in the week). First, an account by the name of ‘Hammer Capital’ (which has a blue verification badge) shared the false headline. Then, several other accounts on X picked it up and reshared it. Soon, the trading floor on the New York Stock Exchange reportedly erupted in cheers, and the markets began to rally after days of steep drops.

Following this, an account on X by the name of 'Walter Bloomberg’ (not affiliated to that Bloomberg, but still with a blue verification badge) boosted the false headline to their over 850k followers, which led to first CNBC, and then Reuters, reporting on this fake news.

The U.S. government called it fake news (which again, spoiler, they ended up proving real later in the week). And in the less-than-an-hour that all this transpired, the markets first gained $2.4 trillion, before losing $2.5 trillion.

In this issue of Signpost, we look at how the news was reported outside the U.S. in major news media, including the Daily Mail from the U.K. (the highest circulation paid newspaper tabloid in the country) and The Economic Times from India (the world’s second-most widely read English-language business newspaper after the Wall Street Journal).

🏦 DAILY MAIL: How actual 'fake news' sent Wall Street on a $2.4 trillion rollercoaster in just 15 minutes [link]

📢 What Daily Mail is saying
The Daily Mail peppers it’s otherwise fairly straightforward coverage with some hyperbole. The language used in several sections could be construed to be sensationalist, but it’s hard to criticise when the story itself is so insane.

1. 📸 Visuals

There are nine visuals in this story, and they fluctuate between people’s faces and falling line graphs. The first three visuals are bundled together. They show the smiling face of Kevin Hassett, the stern face of Donald Trump, and the mostly-red-slightly-green graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at closing on Monday.

Beginning with the first photo, Hassett looks happy, smiling broadly dressed in a grey suit with a lavender shirt and a black tie with yellow dots. He’s wearing half-rimmed glasses, and looks to be outside. Donald Trump, in the next photo, also looks to be outside, and is wearing a black jacket with a white shirt and blue tie. His right hand is raised in a half wave, and his expression is stern.

The fourth visual is a screenshot of the post on X that reportedly kicked the story into overdrive. It’s the post by Walter Bloomberg proclaiming in all caps that Trump is considering a pause on all tariffs for 90-days except for China. Following this is what looks like screenshots of 1 day market data from Google for the S&P 500 (showing a red graph) and the Nasdaq Composite (showing a green graph). Below this is a photo of two men in checkered shirts and what looks like the classic investment banker-bro sleeveless puffy jacket from Patagonia looking off to the left, while behind them the TV proclaims breaking news showing a falling New York Stock Exchange index. Both men look serious, worried, and have dark circles and receding hairlines.

Towards the end is a video embedded showing Trump sitting with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, where Trump gesticulates with his arms speaking about resetting the trade relationship with China. And below that is a screenshot from Fox News showing ‘business expert’ Maria Bartiromo’s face mid-sentence spliced next to an image showing the Dow Jones stock index falling.

2. ✍🏽 Words

If you count ‘$2.4’ as one word, the Daily Mail’s headline is still 16 words long! Without having to rehash the whole story, we’ll look instead at the unique words and language used in the article.

The first line calls the market fluctuations a ‘joyride’, laying blame at the feet of a ‘rogue tweet’. This is again reiterated in the next sentence where the ‘massive swing’ is described to have occurred during ‘15 chaotic minutes’ before the markets eventually ‘snapped back to reality’. The next line attempts to explain the perpetual state of terror that the markets are currently living in, by calling the event a ‘dizzying market U-turn’ which ‘exposed just how jittery Wall Street has become’, where one minute ‘a hint of hope send stocks soaring,’ while ‘rumors […] trigger a crash minutes later’.

After having laid the (arguably justifiable) sensationalist foundation to the story, the article hints at a deeper fear that the markets were anticipating ‘a repeat of 1987’s Black Monday’, a famous stock market crash where worldwide losses were estimated to be $1.71 trillion.

The article then mentions something I was unaware of, the VIX, which is ‘Wall Street’s fear gauge’, saying it’s at ‘its highest level since August 2024’.

The next few paragraphs are spent rehashing the sequence of events, with words like ‘twist’, ‘slumped’, and ‘whipsawed’. This is followed by quotes from finance experts essentially saying that the tariffs are a bad idea, before saying that the next phase of the American economy will not be a recession, but likely ‘stagflation’, which is where ‘prices continue to soar’ as ‘economic growth slows and unemployment rises.’ Which is, as per the economists mentioned in the article ‘worse than a recession’.

The article ends with a mention of Fox News, saying that they too ‘acknowledge the potential economic nightmare’, along with the CEO of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon.

❓ What it means
The article is a fairly faithful retelling of what happened on the day, along with some additional context and quotes from other experts. While this does fall into certain Daily Mail editorial tropes, including an overly long headline, and the liberal uses of emotional words, the reason that reading this article doesn’t feel overtly over-the-top is likely because:

1. The story is sensational enough

2. Business and finance news is, at the end of the day, meant to be delivered seriously. And even the Daily Mail could not push the reporting of this news to their usual tabloid extremes.

⚠️ Why it matters
The Daily Mail is considered to be a tabloid — sensationalist stories and sensationalist reporting are their bread and butter. They also are considered to be editorially conservative, if not right-wing, and have been criticised in the past for their unreliability and scare stories.

This article sits under the ‘Your Money’ section of the website. And there is also a mention in the article of terms like ‘stagflation’ and the fact that the markets are ‘a key component of Americans’ 401(K)s and other saving accounts.’ The article is trying to make relevant a story about hyper-fluctuating markets to the average person. Which is why the throwaway references to savings accounts, the repeated mentions of inflation (and worse) in the world’s largest economy, and the explanation of the word stagflation. It looks like the article is painting a worst case scenario of the situation, which isn’t terribly different from what other media are reporting.

The mention of Fox News at the bottom validates this. It’s almost as if the Daily Mail is saying ‘Don’t believe us? Even Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleaders say the same thing!’

Hard to say if they consider Fox News as peers or competition. Or perhaps both.

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🔍 THE ECONOMIC TIMES: How a 15-word fake Trump quote triggered a $5 trillion Wall Street whiplash in under half an hour [link]

📢 What The Economic Times is saying
The Economic Times provides less overall context of the ramifications of the violent market fluctuation, and instead focus solely on the who, what, where, how, and why of the story.

1. 📸 Visuals

The article has four visuals, three of which are posts from X. The first image looks like a standard stock image of a red arrow plunging in front of a board of numbers that are all negative with red downward pointing arrowheads next to them. It’s meant to indicate a market loss, but is the stock-iest of stock photos.

Following this is the screenshot of Walter Bloomberg as mentioned in the Daily Mail article. After this is an embedded X post from Hammer Capital, where he is responding to his own post from when he posted before Walter Bloomberg did. In this response post, Hammer Capital tries to distance himself from his initial post, saying that he posted what was already being reported from ‘trading desks’.

The last visual is a post on X from Phil Mattingly, who says that he didn’t realise that Walter Bloomberg was not pulling headlines from a Bloomberg Terminal. He also says he is likely not the only one who thought as much.

2. ✍🏽 Words

As if to outdo the Daily Mail, The Economic Times’s headline is 19 words long. And while all these headline structures fly in the face of conventional journalism rules, the article does provide a brief synopsis at the top of the page, in case you are not interested in reading the whole article.

Should you choose to though, the article opens with a sensationalist sentence, saying that what happened on Wall Street was ‘more like a scripted drama than real life’. The article then quickly summarises the entire story, including in text the X post that ended up going viral, saying that that post ‘was enough to send billions of dollars ricocheting through global markets’.

The article also explains that while the initial market ascent was of $2.4 trillion, the market descent after The White House denial was of $2.5 trillion, leading to the stocks remaining mostly flat later in the day, ‘having yo-yoed on nothing more than speculation’. Another X post is included in text here, reflecting on the ridiculousness of the situation.

Here’s where the article begins to dig. It asks the question in one of the subheadings, ‘Who or What is Walter Bloomberg?’, explaining that he isn’t affiliated with Bloomberg News, but still has almost a million followers on X. The article also mentions that while the ‘post in question was later deleted’, it was already too late and had ‘gone viral across trading desks and financial broadcasts’. But where did Walter get the news from?

Turns out that Walter Bloomberg pointed to Reuters and CNBC as his source, despite the CNBC anchors ‘seen reading out the headline live on air — seemingly after the tweet had gone viral’. A CNBC anchor is also quoted as saying that they are checking on the source of the post.

Following this is the report of the denial from The White House, and Reuters, who picked up the story from CNBC, blame CNBC, before apologising for their error. CNBC also offers an apology for the fake news. That’s that then?

Not quite. The article mentions that further digging brought up the post from Hammer Capital, who had posted the same headline as Walter Bloomberg did but a full two minutes prior. The article continues that Hammer Capital said that this news was already circulating on trading desks prior to his posting.

So then, what really happened? Here’s where the article attempts an explanation — the fake headline could have appeared from a ‘cheaper or experimental feed within a financial newswire service’. Specifically, ‘a lower-tier or AI-generated summary of [economic adviser] Hassett’s Fox News appearance was misread, misinterpreted, or miswritten’. However, it turns out that ‘the original information […] appears to have come from nowhere concrete’.

Towards the end, the article raises the question of ‘the cost and fragmentation of access to reliable financial information’, ending with the reflection that ‘sometimes even professional traders are flying blind’. Not much hope for the rest of us then.

❓ What it means
The Economic Times is one of the flagship newspapers in India, highly respected and widely read. It is part of the greater The Times Group, which also owns The Times of India, and a clutch of TV, radio, and online assets. Being a business and finance focused newspaper, it skews a bit more conservative and right-leaning.

The article doesn’t really explore the overall ramifications of the event and how it ties into the wider tariff story, nor does it contextualise the event based on a wider global economic recession. It simply seeks to find out what happened. And with this focus, it sheds a lot more detail on the story, further elucidating another aspect of the story not yet considered; the price of reliable information, especially when the markets are run on pure unadulterated hormones.

⚠️ Why it matters
By shifting the focus on to the topic of ‘reliable financial information’, The Economic Times is playing not only to its strengths, but also to its audience. Being a business-focused publication, it is read overwhelmingly by people in the industry or with a casual interest in the space. The Economic Times are not here to make the average person think about their savings, or the oncoming recession, because their target audience already knows this. They instead are looking to focus on something their audience may not have considered while the markets were catching fire — the very real impact of fake news on trigger happy investors.

Perhaps this is their way of subtly asking their readers to pay to read The Economic Times?

WHAT’S GOING ON? 

📉 Panic at the Stock Market

As of writing, the U.S. has paused all tariffs at 10% for all countries (except for Mexico and Canada who were blanketed with pre-existing tariffs) while increasing tariffs on China to 145% (China has retaliated with it’s own tariffs on U.S. goods at 125%). So while the U.S. and China seem to be playing a game of who-can-state-a-higher-number, the rest of the world has a 90-day reprieve where everybody is negotiating with the U.S. for more favourable trade deals.

For the rest of us consumers, it is terrifying to think that the world economy is in the hands of the kinds of people who are driven by ego and fear. And this story, regardless of where you read about it, reminds us all that perhaps the most powerful emotion in the world is greed.

Let’s also not forget that all the people posting with unearned authority and misplaced confidence on X were ‘blue badge verified’. Which tells you all you need to know about the platform’s verification system, and (depressingly) X’s influence on the financial markets.

Does this mean we’re in for a recession? Or perhaps stagflation? Or perhaps a new term economists will coin to sound smart while the rest of the world burns?

The truth, as always, is somewhere in between.
Read widely. Question thoroughly. Decide accordingly.

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Was this forwarded to you? Signpost is a free weekly newsletter analysing what the media says, what it means, and why it matters. It’s free to subscribe. Alternatively, you can add me on LinkedIn.