White House Denies Axios’ Report Which Denied Reuters Report About Trump’s Border Tax

Around noon today, retail stocks jumped after Axios reported that Trump’s econ advisor Gary Cohn was opposing a House version of the Border Adjustment Tax, giving hope to retailers who were battered following yesterday’s Reuters interview in which Trump said that he supports “some form” of border tax. 

The result, as we observed earlier, was a  mirror image of yesterday’s retail selloff, “as now the market no longer has to fear Trump’s tweets, but his staggering position reversals, now coming inside the span of a day.”

In retrospect the market had nothing to fear, because shortly after its origianl report on BAT, Axios followed up with a second report, according to which the White House denies the original report on Cohn’s BAT statement, and says that Trump’s position is unchanged from what he said yesterday.

“There is no daylight between Gary Cohn and the President. His comment was taken out of context as it was part of a broader conversation about the proposals that are connected to border adjustability. At no point during this conversation did Gary make a statement of support or opposition to the House border adjustability plan.”

Axios adds that the White House declined to make audio of Cohn’s comments available to Axios, citing the agreed-upon confidentiality of Cohn’s remarks.

While it is likely that the XRT has again tumbled on the news, at this point neither we, nor anyone else car, and we will simply wait for the next fake news market moving event before posting any more charts.