Wall Street: The tweets that shook the market

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President Trump's active Twitter account erased $500 billion of stock market value in one day last week, said Anneken Tappe at CNN. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 600 points in a "sell-off driven by President Trump's response to new retaliatory tariffs from China and Fed policy." In a stream of exclamatory tweets, the president at one point speculated about whether Fed chairman Jerome Powell or Chinese President Xi Jinping was the worse "enemy" of the U.S. The Twitter outburst "overshadowed the annual Federal Reserve symposium at Jackson Hole," where Powell soberly dismissed the rush to future interest rate reductions. Trump summarily fumed, "The Fed did NOTHING!" Of course, it wasn't the Fed that tanked the market, said Tiana Lowe at ­Washington Examiner. That's all Trump's doing. What the president doesn't seem to realize is that his "increasingly senile Twitter tantrums" are "not just jeopardizing the valuation of companies owned by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. He's threatening the life savings of ordinary Americans."

"Days like Friday are creating stress in the trenches," said Sarah Ponczek and Vildana Hajric at Bloomberg. Trump says his focus is winning the trade war, "but for traders coping with the price impact of his tirades, it's all they want to talk about." At one point last week, Trump practically held the market hostage after tweeting he would "be responding to China's tariffs in the afternoon," sending stocks sliding into the void. One investor compared it to screaming, "Hey, something bad is coming, hold on." The world economy is already teetering, and "Trump's shoot-first approach adds to the risks at a delicate moment," said Neil Irwin at The New York Times. Powell had delivered a nuanced speech in Wyoming that kept the Fed's options open, and the markets barely reacted. But after Trump barged in, mocking Powell and urging companies to disinvest from China, stocks plunged. "If a recession and breakdown in international commerce happens in the coming year, histories of the episode may well spend a chapter on the Friday collision of official offices in the government actions of Beijing, in the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, and in the Oval Office."

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The market, not unlike Trump's Twitter account, can "sound like a stubborn, bratty child throwing a hissy fit," said Andy Kessler at The Wall Street Journal, but it tends to get what it wants. I'm reminded of Sept. 29, 2008, when the House voted down a $700 billion rescue package after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the market dropped 777 points, losing $1.2 trillion in value. Congress got the message: A bailout was passed five days later. "Until recently the market was pretty silent on trade," but the past few weeks have sent stocks into spasms. The market wants an end to the trade war; you can take Friday's episode as a "desperate cry for attention." President Trump "likes to use the stock market as a report card for his presidency," said Jonathan Garber at Fox Business. So if indeed the market is sending Trump a message, a sell-off like Friday's is just the kind of signal that could get him to listen.