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When the U.S. stock market opened on Monday morning, so too did the floodgates of anxiety over an economic slowdown.
The volatile moment stemmed from a complicated confluence of factors. The strength of the Japanese yen had spiked days earlier, causing ripple effects in other markets. A U.S. employment report released on Friday showed a slowing job market. And investors panicked, worried that the Federal Reserve had waited too long to cut interest rates.
A stock sell-off ensued, resulting in the sharpest daily decline of the S&P 500 since September 2022. And though Wall Street had steadied by Tuesday, uncertainty lingers.
Joe Rennison, who reports on the financial markets for The New York Times and has covered the beat for more than a decade, was on vacation in the Catskills in upstate New York, with limited cellphone service, when the news began to break. He returned to New York City on Saturday to closely follow the market, make calls to sources and decipher it all for Times readers.
In an interview, Mr. Rennison shared how he reported on the fast-moving markets, and why it’s so important to contextualize the moment and not, as he said, “over-egg things.” This interview has been edited and condensed.
When did you start to notice fluctuations in the market?
I was meant to be on holiday until this week. Two weeks ago, we’d written a story setting up what was coming, because it was going to be a big week for central bank meetings, economic data. Those things could shift the backdrop for financial markets. Before I left, I flagged to editors that if things flared up, I would find a signal and be able to chip in.
People were a little on edge last week, let’s say, or paying attention, so I was checking in a bit. The Bank of Japan meeting last week was very significant, the Fed meeting a day later was significant. And then obviously the job statement released on Friday really was the catalyst toward the broader concerns about the economy.
The nice thing about being a markets reporter is that you tend to get your weekend most of the time. The earliest opportunity to start trading or betting on the U.S. markets comes on Sunday night. Once that opened and it was looking pretty ugly, that was when I knew I would be in the office on Monday. I hate missing these things.
Would you say that’s one of the primary satisfactions you get from reporting these bigger events, where it’s all hands on deck?
Yeah, it feels like there’s a very pronounced public service that you’re offering in those moments. More people are paying attention to financial markets than perhaps they otherwise would. There’s a really important role to play in putting these kinds of events in the proper context, trying not to be shrill, trying not to over-egg things — making sure you’re reporting on a crisis, and not contributing to it.
How do you know where to draw that reporting line?
The most recent example was the banking mini-crisis last year in March. If you start overthinking bank failures or writing a lot of stories about fears and concerns, you definitely can exacerbate clients of that bank going and taking their money out, and you can self-fulfill a crisis. You have to be incredibly responsible in that period.
I remember early on in my career as a markets reporter, watching other reporters in these moments. And it’s nice to feel like I’ve come into a period in my career where I’ve been through enough of these to have a slightly more sober mind-set, to step back and think through things before rushing to write something.
The other point we try and make in our reporting is the connected nature of global markets. What happens in D.C. or Tokyo ripples across the world.
How long do these ripple effects tend to last? Is this something that has the potential to affect the elections in November?
In the sense that everything is connected, sure. But it will be a new episode by then. Causally linked, but still a new episode. If the current sell-off builds enough momentum, and people start to become concerned about the economy and those concerns lead to them pulling back how much they’re going to spend, maybe companies pull back spending, or people start to spend less.
That’s the sort of situation where, rather than markets reflecting what is happening in the economy, markets start to drive what happens.
At all times you have a duty to try and reflect whatever you are reporting on at the truest level possible, but especially at moments like this, it needs to be done without the temptation to make it more than it is.
Do you have a method to cut through the jargon and break down complicated markets data for readers?
The very traditional form of news reporting is you say what happened first, “who, what, why, when, where.” But fundamentally you’re saying what happened, and then you go through the context of that. Market reporting, I find, tends to communicate better if you start with the “why.” And then you can get to the “what.”
The “why” is telling the reader why this matters to them. Sadly the state of most people’s economic literacy is not great. With every article I write, I try to tell readers why this matters to them and why they should care. Why should they read 1,200 words of a market story? You have to tell them why this matters, why it is significant and why you’re writing the story.