By Mark GongloffThe suddenness of Facebooks deceleration is shocking.
Hopefully Trump is getting smarter about his trade wars.
Business sentiment is starting to sour.
Trump is still putting his cabinet officials in terrible spots.
Trumps tweets could get him in real trouble.
The Incredible Shrinking FacebookPeople have complained for a while now that Facebook Inc.
is too big.
Well, good news: It just got 20 per cent less big in a hurry.Facebooks market valuation collapsed by about $120 billion today roughly the equivalent of a General Electric Co.
or a 3M Co.
personally costing Mark Zuckerberg $15 billion in just the first few minutes of trading.
He will now be forced to carry on with just $71 billion.
Thoughts and prayers.Driving all this pain was an earnings report Shira Ovide describes as utter disaster for investors.
The raw numbers 42 per cent revenue growth, 2.5 billion global users dont sound disastrous.
But growth rates have slowed dramatically:Investors had gotten used to the idea of Facebook growing to the sky forever.
And those days appear to suddenly be over, Shira writes.Of course, Facebook is still growing and still worth more than $500 billion.
Matt Levine suggests being able to lose a record $120 billion in one day is a more impressive financial accomplishment than anything that almost any other company has done in the history of stock markets.
And maybe investors shouldnt have been so surprised.
Facebook has been under relentless fire for a host of sins, including its use of private data and its inability/unwillingness to police toxic content.
It has warned investors it will spend a lot of money to address some of those problems.
But Shira, in a second column, suggests even Facebook wasnt quite aware of how revenue, profitability and user growth would all come to a screeching slowdown at once.
Maybe that #DeleteFacebook movement wasn't such a joke after all.The Trade War Pain Has Just BegunThough President Donald Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker struck a truce yesterday that temporarily cooled tensions between the US and EU, the conflict isnt over yet.
Bloombergs editors applaud Trump for seemingly recognizing he needs a different approach, though they wonder how long he will keep the peace.
All trade wars are dangerous, Noah Smith writes, but they dont all have to be dumb.
And getting the EU on your side in trying to change Chinas trade practices is one way to make a trade war smarter, Noah says assuming, again, that Trump has actually accomplished such a thing, which is still unclear.Trumps trade-war timing has certainly been bad, writes Stephen Gandel.
It may not hurt wealthy stock investors much, but it could hurt wage-earners who have been waiting for substantial raises for a long, long time.
Barry Ritholtz notes that, even with Wednesdays truce, the steel and aluminum tariffs that have hurt corporate profits are still filtering into consumer prices: I am starting to consider the very real possibility that the latest White House trade policies will indeed have a signficiant negative economic impact, and do very real damage.