Wall Street Actually Came Up With an Index to Predict When Trump Will ‘TACO’ to Sate Markets

(Alex Brandon/AP photo)

Wall Street has found a way to quantify the likelihood President Donald Trump will back down from market disrupting moves or, as it’s become known, when Trump will “TACO” (Trump always chickens out).

The so-called Trump “pressure index” was created by Deutsche Bank strategist Maximilian Uleer and it charts the amount of pressure the president is under to change course.

Axios explained the different variables charted by Uleer’s index, “it considers the one-month change in Trump’s approval ratings, stock market performance and whether people and bond markets are expecting higher inflation. (Thanks to the Financial Times’ Robert Armstrong for highlighting this index.)” Notably, Armstrong was also the first to coin “TACO” as a term for when Trump backs down to external pressure.

Axios’s Emily Peck noted that as of this moment the “index is higher now than it was even during ‘Liberation Day,’ when the S&P 500 tumbled on the announcement of huge tariffs on basically every country in the world.”

As of close Thursday, the S&P 500 was down over 1.7% and the Nasdaq dropped a whopping 2.38% – putting its recent losses in correction territory. Peck explains that the current situation is hitting the economy and Trump’s political capital harder than the tariff chaos because of the shock to energy.

“There’s also a notion on Wall Street that Trump is likely to pull back on a policy if the stock market falls about 5% from its highs, Jose Torres, a senior economist at Interactive Brokers, told Axios last week,” she added.

Trump did announce an additional ten day grace period to continue negotiations with Iran, promising to continue to delay targeting oil production facilities, but at the same time speculation he may order a ground invasion has ramped up.

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