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A solitary false tweet on Monday morning caused several trillion dollars of stock market movement in about 15 minutes, which is cleanly among the top five most absurd things to have happened since Donald Trump returned to the White House. There is much to track during this tariff-induced moment of extreme wealth destruction. One thing that Monday’s fracas laid plain is that we are in the easiest moment in modern history to commit enormous financial crimes and get away with them. That has been true for months and will be true for years, but it has been extra true of the past few days of stock turmoil. If you are an aspiring financial criminal, these are the halcyon days.

What exactly happened in this specific case? For an incredibly detailed accounting, see here, though for our purposes this is essentially what you have to know: Early in the morning, Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett gave an interview on Fox News, where he defended his boss’s decision to torch the stock market so that Americans will one day manufacture more of the world’s T-shirts. Aaron Rupar, the liberal video-clipper who watches TV and rapidly reposts clips of political officials to millions of accounts across the internet, shared a clip from the interview. In the clip, Fox’s Brian Kilmeade asked Trump’s econ guy if the president would consider a 90-day tariff pause, and Hassett gave the kind of meandering, unclear answer that has typified Trump officials’ remarks of late.

More than an hour later, a big X account going by the name “Walter Bloomberg” posted an all-caps interpretation of Hassett’s words: “🚨 HASSETT: TRUMP IS CONSIDERING A 90-DAY PAUSE IN TARIFFS FOR ALL COUNTRIES EXCEPT CHINA.” Hassett did not say that, but “Walter Bloomberg,” who is unaffiliated with the financial news service, has more than 800,000 followers. He also has a blue check mark, which once signified authenticity on Twitter but now signifies that an X account pays a few bucks a month and is eligible to receive revenue from Elon Musk in proportion to how many people see its posts.

Still, stocks popped immediately, with the S&P 500 going from roughly 4 percent down on the day to roughly 2 percent up in the span of literally a few minutes. Most of those gains went away just as quickly, when market participants went looking for some kind of story behind “Walter Bloomberg’s” plausible-sounding headline. He later deleted it and pretended the headline had come from Reuters. (It did not.) Within the hour, the White House issued a real, easily sourceable denial. The day’s gains were gone.

Did “Walter Bloomberg” merely misinterpret a Fox News clip? Only the account’s operator can know that. A big swath of the political internet nowadays consists of accounts sharing clips posted by Rupar (and his cohort of a few other professional political TV reposters) without actually watching them, or, if they have watched them, without the full picture. It’s possible that the account’s operator just made the kind of careless mistake that countless people make online every day. (His just has a trillion-dollar price tag on it. Oops!)

It is stunning, though, how easy it was for one account’s bad tweet—the kind that any account could replicate on purpose—to distort the whole stock market. Putting out a false dispatch with the goal of moving a stock is not a fresh idea for a crime, but what is incredible about this episode is how simple and far-reaching the ramifications were from one untrue post. Manipulating even one stock, let alone the entire market, generally takes at least a little bit of ingenuity. It requires some effort, and often time. Perhaps you buy up a bunch of call options, hoping to profit on a stock’s short-term rise, and then launch a fake takeover bid for its company. (Real case!) Maybe you get very into the weeds and set up an entire little ecosystem of fake Twitter accounts that look like real market research firms’ accounts, and you use your kingdom of dupes to tank select stocks. (Also real!) These require a reasonable level of effort and planning, and even then, the perps will probably get caught.

This thing on Monday, intentional or not, was a different category altogether. It took almost no legwork. An unremarkable White House staffer went on TV and answered a question evasively. An X account with the ability to reach millions of people’s screens—and, under the right account settings, make money from Musk’s platform in the process—gave a false description of what he had said. Trillions of dollars in enterprise value were born and killed in minutes. It is all just so simple—and so would be profiting from it.

The vast majority of, if not all, cases of market manipulation and insider trading center around individual stocks, but we currently exist in a moment when the world stock market depends on one elderly man expressing a certain view of trade protectionism on a certain day. If you can convince enough traders that Trump had the right thought cross his mind, you can move not just one stock, but the entire market, and you can profit from a nicely timed purchase of the least suspect equity of all: a broad-market index fund.

Ben Mathis-Lilley Read More

Imagine if you aren’t just some guy with a big enough social media account and an aptitude for headline writing, but instead, a person who works in Trump’s orbit. Trump’s administration is loaded with billionaires who know a good market opportunity when they see it. If you are a Trump Cabinet member or a White House staffer with knowledge of when the administration might make certain announcements, why wouldn’t you seize the trading opportunity of a lifetime? Trump is a financial criminal 34 times over, his New York convictions all stemming from falsified business records, and he seems to be doing quite well, after all. Plus, Trump has been on a pardoning and commuting spree for financial criminals, setting free not just crypto industry favorites but garden-variety fraudsters.

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In other words, there’s mounting evidence that financial crimes are no longer going to be treated as crimes, as long as the people who have committed them are in the president’s good graces. The whole stock market resting on Trump’s whims creates a shockingly good opportunity for anyone with access to Trump to make a veritable killing. Why shouldn’t someone like Howard Lutnick, the billionaire commerce secretary, add a low-cost index fund to his portfolio just before an eventual Trump announcement claiming victory and rolling back some tariffs? Lutnick’s latest financial disclosure is very long. What would the addition of an S&P 500 index fund do? Are we going to penalize a Cabinet member for believing in the U.S. stock market? How unpatriotic.

Ideally, a country’s laws—including ones that make the manipulation of stock markets illegal—would apply the same way to all people inside that country. That is not the case in the United States anymore, but our financial markets had been soldiering on anyway. Another ideal thing is for the market to not depend completely on what the U.S. president is thinking at any given moment. That is also not our current reality. Combining these two shortcomings, the one about the rule of law and the one about stock markets not hinging on one person’s moods, makes for a turbulent time in the market. But it makes for an unprecedented moneymaking opportunity for an enterprising crook who sees this moment for what it is.

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