I don’t know, maybe Friday Trump felt like he was at risk of being retroactively upstaged by Thursday Trump when it comes to dominating headlines.
Or maybe one of his advisors made the mistake of explaining just how good the May payrolls report was last night and at 7:21 a.m. Friday morning, Trump reached the limit in terms of how long he could keep a secret.
But whatever the case, the President of the United States is now pre-announcing critical, market moving econ data, ensuring that when it comes to payrolls, the only way Wall Street economists have any hope of producing a preview of the monthly jobs report that’s more prescient than Trump’s Twitter take is by sheer, blind luck because Trump is looking at the actual numbers.
Earlier, in a post over at Dealbreaker, I documented the myriad reasons why it’s a bad idea for Trump to be tweet-teasing NFP. In the two hours after the release (and by “the release” I mean the official release, at 8:30, not the pre-release, at 7:21) the White House has been at pains to explain why this is no big deal.
Quoth Huckabee Sanders, quoth Eamon Javers:
Kudlow agrees with the Press Secretary, telling CNBC the following:
I don’t think he gave anything away incidentally. And I think this is all according to routine, law and custom.
Well actually, Larry, that’s not true. And if this wasn’t Trump, he would be in trouble.
“If it was anyone but the president, you would have just gotten yourself a nice appointment with the FBI or the SEC,” former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee told CNBC’s “Squawk Box”.
Perhaps the most dangerous thing about this is that it sets a precedent. Consider the following from SocGen’s Omair Sharif who spoke to Bloomberg:
It adds a little extra uncertainty prior to the release. If [we] don’t get a tweet next time, people will think it’s going to be a bad print.
Exactly. So now, people are going to be predisposed to fading the dollar and buying USTs ahead of subsequent jobs reports in the event there’s no Trump tweet.
Obviously, that’s unlikely to materially impact markets especially on days where there are other fundamental drivers headed into payrolls, but what it very well could do is exaggerate trends in the dollar and USTs that are already in place on NFP Fridays.
100% pure David Dennison. Accept no substitutes.
