The dollar falls but Wall Street shrugs off Trump’s tweeted firing of Tillerson
New York — US President Donald Trump’s high-profile ouster of secretary of state Rex Tillerson sent the US dollar down slightly on Tuesday, with crude oil falling after an initial jump. Trump gave Tillerson the boot on Tuesday after a series of public rifts over policy on North Korea, Russia and Iran, and replaced his chief diplomat with loyalist CIA director Mike Pompeo. His firing — the biggest shake-up of Trump’s cabinet since he took office in January 2017 — was announced by the president on Twitter. Evercore ISI strategist Stan Shipley in New York called it "another sign of a problem in the Trump administration". The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of major currencies, fell 0.28%, with the euro up 0.52% at $1.2396. Crude oil initially jumped on the Tillerson news, with investors seeing signs that a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme could collapse, but the trend reversed later in the day. MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe shed 0.06%, while the pa...
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