How a false headline about a tariff 'pause' triggered a wild stock market jump
US markets briefly surged on Monday amid false rumours that President Donald Trump was mulling a 90-day pause on tariffs, before they plunged again. Euroverify investigates.
READ MORE : http://www.euronews.com/2025/04/08/how-a-false-headline-about-a-tariff-pause-triggered-a-wild-stock-market-jump
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US markets briefly surged on Monday amid false rumours that President Donald Trump was mulling a 90-day pause on tariffs, before they plunged again. Euroverify investigates.
READ MORE : http://www.euronews.com/2025/04/08/how-a-false-headline-about-a-tariff-pause-triggered-a-wild-stock-market-jump
Subscribe to our channel. Euronews is available on Dailymotion in 12 languages
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NewsTranscript
00:00How a false headline caused a stock market whiplash.
00:08On Monday, a false news report claiming US President Donald Trump was considering a pause on his sweeping tariffs
00:16sent markets soaring before they tumbled back down again when the White House denied the claims.
00:22The origin of the fake news seems to be this interview with Trump's economic advisor, Kevin Hassett.
00:28Will you do a 90-day pause? Would you consider that?
00:31Or a bill? Yeah, you know, I think that the president is going to decide what the president's going to decide.
00:36Hassett was then falsely quoted as saying Trump was considering a 90-day pause on tariffs.
00:42This is the first instance of the claim that we detected, published a couple of hours later by an account which has a mere 829 followers on X.
00:51A more prominent X account under the name Walter Bloomberg then shared this post, which has since been deleted, citing Reuters.
01:00Reuters has since said its source was CNBC, which shared the report live on air as stock markets dramatically surged.
01:08I think we can go with this headline.
01:10Apparently Hassett's been saying that Trump will consider a 90-day pause in tariffs for all countries, except for China.
01:17Both CNBC and Reuters have since issued corrections, but it was enough to send markets surging dramatically, adding an estimated $2.4 trillion in value.
01:30That then evaporated in minutes as the White House shut down the claims.
01:35The episode has shown how vulnerable the stock markets can be to misleading or unfounded news headlines.