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Monkey on The Telephone
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How a game of broken telephone added then subtracted $4 trillion in market value

The news may have been fake, but the market’s desire for tariff relief is very, very real.

J. Edward Moreno

President Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, appeared on Fox News on Monday morning and said nothing particularly remarkable. Then the stock market ripped, adding roughly $4 trillion in value, before giving it back.

Markets reacted to a headline that appeared on Bloomberg terminals, X, and other forums where investors have been watching the value of stocks sink as Trump’s tariff policy threatens to upend global trade and push the US economy into a recession. The alert — which according to 404 Media originated from Benzinga, leaning on misquotes of Hassett on X — said: “HASSETT: TRUMP IS CONSIDERING A 90-DAY PAUSE IN TARIFFS FOR ALL COUNTRIES EXCEPT CHINA”

Often headlines for important, fast-moving news will appear on Bloomberg terminals or other market data services first before details are available. (Misattributing the sourcing of this headline amid the frenzy was something our markets editor dropped the ball on, too.)

Eager for good news, traders (and algorithms set up to respond to headlines) bought back stocks, temporarily erasing some of the heavy losses global markets have withstood since “Liberation Day.” The problem was, the administration hadn’t actually budged on tariffs.

When asked by Fox News if the president would consider a 90-day pause, Hassett responded, “I think the president is going to decide what the president is going to decide.” Somehow that was misconstrued, more than an hour after the interview, to mean tariff relief is on the table.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNBC the headline going around was “fake news,” a term Trump’s camp uses often but was unusually appropriate today.

The headline spread like wildfire on X, where it was picked up by a class of day trader accounts that tweet breaking news headlines, usually from real news sources, but don’t include attribution or a link. One of them, who goes by the name Walter Bloomberg, has been catching some of the flack for the mistake and said they got the headline from Reuters.

A spokesperson for Reuters told Sherwood News that its headline was “drawing from a headline on CNBC.” The network did run that headline on air, but its unclear if it was drawing from its own newsroom’s reporting or if it was the same headline everyone else was fooled by.

“Reuters has withdrawn the incorrect report and regrets its error,” the spokesperson said. Comcast, which owns CNBC, did not immediately respond to a request for comment but confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that it ran “unconfirmed information in a banner” on air.

The finger-pointing over who’s responsible for the $4 trillion screwup will likely continue, but one thing it did make clear amid the chaos and confusion is that investors desperately want relief from tariffs, and any easing on those import taxes stands to reverse some of the stock market’s hefty losses.

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Luke Kawa

Texas Instruments soars as Q1 guidance exceeds estimates and CEO touts “a lot of room to go” on industrial recovery

Texas Instruments soared in after-hours trading as better than expected Q1 guidance outweighed a mediocre set of Q4 results.

The chipmaker sees current quarter sales ranging between $4.32 billion to $4.62 billion, the midpoint of which is slightly north of the consensus estimate for $4.42 billion. The outlook for earnings per share of $1.22 to $1.48 also compares favorably to Wall Street’s call for $1.26.

For Q4, sales of $4.42 billion were a tad below the consensus call for $4.43 billion, while earnings per share of $1.27 came in three cents light of the Street’s view. However, earnings per share included a six-cent hit that was not incorporated into the company’s guidance, Texas Instruments said.

Managing expectations had not been Texas Instruments’ strong suit as of late: the stock sank after the firm reported Q3 results since Q4 guidance was weak. And during the conference call that followed Q2 earnings, three separate analysts remarked that CEO Haviv Ilan’s “tone” wasn’t too upbeat despite better than expected financials and decent guidance.

This time, the outlook and commentary is all sunshine and rainbows.

“The first quarter guidance is significantly stronger than seasonal,” remarked Deutsche Bank analyst Ross Seymore. “And if my math is right, it seems like it's the first time you've guided up sequentially since right after the financial crisis 15 years ago, roughly.”

Ilan credited this to a persistent recovery in industrial demand, which accounts for about one third of the company’s sales.

“Remember that on the industrial market, we still have a lot of room to go when you think about the previous peaks,” he said. “So, if you will, the compare, it's still easy for industrial to continue to recover.”

And then, of course, there’s AI. Data center revenues are a small but briskly growing part of TI’s business, accounting for 9% of sales for the full year while surging roughly 70% year-on-year in Q4.

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The guidance was strong, too.

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S&P 500 climbs to new all-time high ahead of Big Tech earnings

Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla will report after the bell tomorrow.

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Matt Phillips

Satellite stocks surge on “sovereign space” plans

Planet Labs is on pace to notch its second 10% gain of the month early Tuesday afternoon, adding to its astronomical run of more than 500% over the last 12 months.

Wedbush Securities tech analyst Dan Ives hiked his price target for the stock to $30 from $28 after hosting a series of meetings with the company and investors in California. Ives wrote:

“[Planet Labs] is seeing massive success through its improved GTM selling motion as the company is providing mission-critical use cases for a wide array of government applications with defense & intelligence, with more international agencies seeing the value in PL’s satellite fleet for situational and maritime domain awareness in real-time as the company is benefitting from increasing defense budgets and the urgent need for international countries to reduce its reliance on the US.”

That commentary is consistent with recent news reports that the German military is planning to build what the Financial Times calls the “the equivalent of Elon Musk’s internet service for the German armed forces.”

A separate report in The Wall Street Journal on Monday said, “Spending on space-related projects is expected to rise in many countries, giving companies new opportunities to sell their wares and services.”

Behind this push, in part, is the fact that the roughly 80-year-old NATO alliance is is under unprecedented strain due to, among other things, US President Donald Trump’s fixation on somehow acquiring the Danish territory of Greenland.

Other space plays seem to be benefiting from similar dynamics, with Rocket Lab and AST SpaceMobile both up solidly on the day.

Governments’ New Must-Have: Their Own Satellites

Governments’ New Must-Have: Their Own Satellites

“[Planet Labs] is seeing massive success through its improved GTM selling motion as the company is providing mission-critical use cases for a wide array of government applications with defense & intelligence, with more international agencies seeing the value in PL’s satellite fleet for situational and maritime domain awareness in real-time as the company is benefitting from increasing defense budgets and the urgent need for international countries to reduce its reliance on the US.”

That commentary is consistent with recent news reports that the German military is planning to build what the Financial Times calls the “the equivalent of Elon Musk’s internet service for the German armed forces.”

A separate report in The Wall Street Journal on Monday said, “Spending on space-related projects is expected to rise in many countries, giving companies new opportunities to sell their wares and services.”

Behind this push, in part, is the fact that the roughly 80-year-old NATO alliance is is under unprecedented strain due to, among other things, US President Donald Trump’s fixation on somehow acquiring the Danish territory of Greenland.

Other space plays seem to be benefiting from similar dynamics, with Rocket Lab and AST SpaceMobile both up solidly on the day.

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Matt Phillips

Corning-Meta deal reignites optical connections trade

Corning’s $6 billion deal with Meta to provide fiber-optic cable connections for its AI data centers is reigniting an AI-related trade that’s been stalled out over the last month.

Fellow opto-electrical makers of plugs, cables, and various doodads needed to connect data center servers — such as Amphenol, Coherent, and Lumentum — are also soaring Tuesday.

Such stocks ripped in the second half of 2025 before the rally sputtered out in the first half of December. But the amount of money Meta plans to shower on Corning has clearly cheered up competitors — and investors — in the space today.

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Corning soars after striking deal to sell up to $6 billion in optical infrastructure to Meta

Corning soars after striking deal to sell up to $6 billion in optical infrastructure to Meta

Such stocks ripped in the second half of 2025 before the rally sputtered out in the first half of December. But the amount of money Meta plans to shower on Corning has clearly cheered up competitors — and investors — in the space today.

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