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Donald Trump posted some of December’s US jobs figures hours before the release of the economic report, giving traders an early glimpse of data that carries enormous sway in global capital markets.
The president posted a graphic on his Truth Social platform just before 8.30pm New York time on Thursday evening, which showed an increase of 654,000 private-sector jobs since January 2025.
The charts in the slides matched figures that were not publicly available until 8.30am on Friday and gave investors details of how many jobs the world’s biggest economy added from October to December.
Trump later on Friday shrugged off criticism of the early post, saying aides had handed him the figures.
“I don’t know if they posted them. I said post them whenever you get a chance,” he said. “They gave me some numbers. When people give me things, I post them.”
“The numbers are amazing,” the president added.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly employment report is among the most closely watched US economic gauges, providing critical information to traders, particularly in the $30tn Treasury market.
Since the October and November job growth figures were revised in Friday’s report, and the December figure was new, the graphic Trump posted provided vital details on employment in the final quarter of 2025.
FT analysis indicates that no prior release of data matches that total.
The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers typically receives BLS data in advance of its public release to allow the president’s economic advisers time to prepare a response to the data.
A White House official on Friday afternoon said there had been “an inadvertent public disclosure of aggregate data that was partially derived from pre-released information”. The official added that the White House was “accordingly reviewing protocols regarding economic data releases”.
Wall Street largely missed the post on social media the night before, according to investors. One macro hedge fund portfolio manager said no one seemed to notice the post on Thursday evening when it was first published.
While traders religiously followed Trump’s account during the beginning of his second term, the flood of posts that he makes daily has made it difficult for traders to keep up.
The president has previously hinted whether economic data would be positive or negative ahead of official data releases, but this is the first time he has posted information where one could deduce the figure.
“I’m going to have to go back to looking at his damn posts on Truth Social again,” the portfolio manager said, adding that in recent months he automatically deleted alerts that flagged the president’s social media posts directly to his email inbox.
That the post came after US market hours the night before the release would have made it harder for investors to benefit even if they had caught the leak, a second trader said.
Still, another investor said the early disclosure undermined the predictability of data releases. “It makes my life harder. I know this data comes at a certain time,” the person said. “I guess that means I have to create a Truth Social account.”
University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers said the incident was “unprecedented”.
“No White House has ever before leaked such important market-moving numbers. No serious country does this,” he posted on the social media platform Bluesky on Friday morning.
Trump was criticised in his first term after posting “looking forward to seeing the employment numbers” in a tweet ahead of a jobs report in 2018 that was stronger than forecast.
Traders closely scrutinise the rolling averages from recent months of job reports, figures that have become particularly important recently due to concerns about the accuracy of monthly figures due to the government shutdown in the autumn.
Additional reporting by Claire Jones
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