Analysts of banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co have created an index to ascertain the increasing effect of United States President Donald Trump’s tweets on the country’s bond yields, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Called the “Volfefe Index” after Trump’s “covfefe” tweet from May 2017, it will analyse the president’s musings on the microblogging site and see how much of an impact they have on the markets.
On May 31, 2017, Trump had tweeted what appeared to be a typo that read: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. The tweet was later deleted without any clarification.
“The subject of these tweets has increasingly turned toward market-moving topics, most prominently trade and monetary policy,” the analysts said, according to CNN. “And we find strong evidence that tweets have increasingly moved US rates markets immediately after publication.” They also claimed that a number of assets, single-name stocks to macro products, have seen a change in their price dynamics on the basis of Trump’s tweets.
Most of the president’s market-moving tweets included topics such as trade and monetary policy, and used words such as China, products, dollars, great, Democrats and trade. JPMorgan’s analysts also said that their current research was restricted to United States interest rates markets, but the exercise could be transferred to equity or currency markets, according to Reuters.
Since the beginning of 2016, Trump has sent out around 10 tweets per day with 10,000 tweets since his inauguration in 2017, the analysts found. Meanwhile, analysts at investment banking company Citigroup found that a variety of currency pairs recorded higher volatility within an hour after Trump’s tweet.
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US lawmaker proposes Covfefe Act to hold Donald Trump accountable for social media posts
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