A misleading news headline claiming US President Donald Trump was considering a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs caused a brief spike in the US stock markets on Monday, but they collapsed again when the White House denied the reports.
The claim spread quickly on social media, creating an estimated $2.4 trillion (€2.2 trillion) in market value before being erased in just minutes.
The rumours seem to originate from a Fox News interview with White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett, which took place at around 8:30 Eastern Time (2:30 pm CET) on Monday.
Asked on air whether his administration would "consider" a "90-day pause" on tariffs, Hassett responded: "You know, I think the president is going to decide what the president is going to decide."
"There are more than 50 countries in negotiations with the president," he added.
Those comments were then misleadingly reported as indicating the Trump administration was actively considering such a pause.
The first report detected by Euroverify is an X post published by an account named "Hammer Capital", which has a mere 800 followers, around two hours after Hassett's interview.
Later in the day, a now-deleted X post by "Walter Bloomberg" made the claim Trump was considering "a 90-day pause in tariffs for all countries except China," citing Reuters.
Both those X accounts have the blue verification 'tick' on X, but are not linked to any established media outlets or considered stock traders.
On CNBC, stocks can be seen rebounding dramatically as anchor Carl Quintanilla says on air: "I think we can go with this headline: apparently Hassett's been saying that Trump will consider a 90-day pause on tariffs for all countries, except for China."
A Reuters headline on Wednesday, seen by Euroverify, read: "Wall Street reverses course after Hassett's comments on tariff pause."
Both Reuters and CNBC have since issued corrections.
“As we were chasing the news of the market moves in real-time, we aired unconfirmed information in a banner. Our reporters quickly made a correction on air,” a CNBC spokesperson said in a statement.
White House denies reports, sending markets tumbling
A US government X account issued a statement saying the news reports were "wrong,." with a video of Hassett's original statement.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the reports "fake news".
It caused the rapid gains to evaporate in minutes.
The news had earlier caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to erase a loss of 1,700 points and shoot up more than 800, before it went back to a loss of 629 points.
Incident shows markets' vulnerability to fake news
Whatever the origin of the fake reports, the episode has come as a reminder of how vulnerable the stock markets have become to errant news headlines.
In 2013, an official AP Twitter account was hacked and a post was published falsely claiming there had been explosions at the White House, injuring then-President Barack Obama.
It sparked an almost 150-point fall in the Dow Jones industrial average.
Two years later Twitter — which has since been taken over and renamed X by South African-born billionaire Elon Musk — saw its shares jump over 8% after a fake story emulating the format of Bloomberg news claimed the company had been made a $31 billion (€34 billion) takeover offer.
