The Cost Of Fake News For The S&P 500

The fifth and final week of November 2017 was a positive one for the S&P 500 (Index: INX), where the U.S. Congress’ progress toward passing a corporate income tax reduction package helped buoy stock prices throughout the week. That is, until Friday, 1 December 2017, at 11:06 AM Eastern Standard Time, when the ABC News division of Disney (NYSE: DIS) figuratively threw a monkey wrench in the U.S. stock market’s works.

The original live report included the contention that former National Security Adviser Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who had pled guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that morning, would testify that Donald Trump had instructed him to contact Russian government officials during the 2016 election campaign, prior to his election to be U.S. President on 8 November 2016, which would be a violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from negotiating the terms of U.S. foreign policy with foreign government officials without authorization by the U.S. government. Violations of the Logan Act are felonies under U.S. law, where if the contention were true, it would open the door to the impeachment of President Trump, who would not have had the legal authorization to instruct such an action prior to his election.

The following chart reveals what happened to U.S. stock prices, as measured by the value of the S&P 500 index almost immediately after that news hit the wires on 1 December 2017. We’ve marked where the S&P 500 was at 11:06 AM EST, when the story first broke, on the chart.

The main problem with the story is that it proved to be false. After the markets had closed, ABC News would go on to clarify the story to indicate that President-elect Trump (and not Candidate Trump) had provided Flynn that instruction, which later in the evening became a full retraction. ABC News’ main reporter for the story, Brian Ross, has been suspended for four weeks without pay for his role in pushing it on air and at the time of this writing, no other punitive actions on the part of the news network have been announced against the other journalists and producers responsible for advancing the false claims made in the report, although ABC News has apologized for it.