22/04/2025

Many people have questioned just why Donald Trump recently decided to take a hatchet to financial markets, like one of his famous predecessors did to a cherry tree. Perhaps he was getting bored of being President after a couple of months in the job and wanted to shake things up and make them a bit more interesting. Or maybe, like most ageing despots, his thoughts were turning to his place in history. After all, most of his presidential predecessors have ensured immortality by virtue of having lent their name to something that lived on beyond them. John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have had airports named after them; several US Navy aircraft carriers bear the illustrious names of ex-presidents such as Gerald R. Ford and George W. Bush: Jimmy Carter lives on in a nuclear submarine. Countless education establishments and libraries are called after former POTUSes. Herbert Hoover had a dam named in his honour. Barack Obama has a species of trapdoor spider. Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt’s name is commemorated as a cuddly children's toy.

The more senior the Presidents are the bigger the things they tend to have named in their honour. George Washington is immortalised in a whole state, not to mention the nation’s capital city. And there’s hardly anything that hasn’t been named after Abraham Lincoln, from a car to a tunnel to a cemetery to many generations of American male babies. There’s a wonderful and possibly apocryphal story about an Oxford tour guide who was showing a group of American tourists round the City of Dreaming Spires. They were walking down Turl Street and the guide pointed out the imposing parapets and battlements of Lincoln College. “Lincoln College, huh?” grunted one of the tourists, “Yeah, we got one of them back home.” Through gritted teeth the guide explained that Lincoln College, Oxford, was founded by the Bishop of Lincoln in 1427, some four hundred years before Honest Abe’s birth.

But back to Donald Trump, who is clearly seeking to distinguish himself from the presidential crowd by finding something original to be named in his honour, in this case his own personal financial crisis. I’m not sure any crisis has been named after an individual before. This is mainly because individuals are not usually important enough to be able to initiate a financial crisis all by themselves. And if they are important enough, they’re normally too sensible to do so. Financial crises are in the main caused by a very large number of people doing something stupid simultaneously, without realising that everyone else is doing the same thing and the resulting crisis will be named after the unfortunate commodity that everyone so rashly piled into: hence the South Sea Bubble, Tulip Mania or SubPrime loans crisis. This can a little be unfair on the commodity, as tulip bulbs were not themselves to blame for the irrational desire of seventeenth-century Dutch merchants to blindly acquire them.

But the naming rights to financial crises is not an intellectual property that has been much exploited. This is why most crises tend to have rather bland, generic titles such as The Wall Street Crash, the Crash of ‘87 or the Global Financial Crisis (which of course was the sequel to the SubPrime Loans Crisis). Whatever the current crisis ends up being called (my friend Bill Blain is pushing the Trump Tantrum), the President will have contributed to the various stages of it via his eminently rhymable name, for which almost every single variation has some application to financial markets.

Back in January we had the Trump Bump (aka the Trump Pump) when everyone thought the newly-elected President was going to be good for business. Then the Trump Dump, when they decided he wasn’t (this term may also refer to the involuntary bowel movement performed by traders who were long the market just before Trump announced his latest raft of punitive measures against China). As markets continued to disapprove of his tariffs, they may be said to have taken the Trump Hump, which led to a Trump Whump when share prices hit the floor. Next up we may have a Trump Stump, where no one has a clue what the President is going to do next and and gives up trading completely. Or, if the sell off continues in the longer term, it may usher in a Trump Slump. This will probably put the President in a Trump Grump and he will have to like it or Trump Lump it. But of course there is still the possibility that this is all part of an elaborate joke perpetrated on the global economy and he is merely metaphorically showing us the Trump Rump.