Trump Pushes A Drastic Shift In The U.S. Economy With One New Rule

The Trump administration has targeted numerous areas of public life in its efforts to bring about new ways of dealing with all sorts of economic and social issues. In recent months, tariffs have been at the forefront of these actions. While plenty of companies are worried about the effects of tariffs on their business models, the president recently revealed another measure that may steer concerns to a different kind of policy. In September 2025, Donald Trump indicated his interest in changing the way companies report earnings. Rather than abiding by federal regulations that require public enterprises to provide quarterly earnings reports, Trump's new vision will see reports issued every six months instead of every three.

His thoughts on this matter aren't new — or even partisan. 10 years ago, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted her dissatisfaction with "quarterly capitalism" in a Medium article. For his part, Trump acknowledged that a shift of this nature would be at the discretion of SEC approval, which suggests he wasn't — or isn't yet — considering options to move this measure through Congress or to attempt a policy alteration via executive order. This may sound like a small change on the surface, but there are potentially beneficial and alarming caveats to consider.

Donald Trump focused on one consistently important aspect of corporate leadership in his statements on this change. His announcement highlighted that this shift could save companies money by theoretically halving the time they're required to adhere to reporting standards. Moreover, management teams would then have additional time and energy to focus on their businesses' daily tasks. This change could effectively streamline business operations and allow companies to better compete in a highly fluid corporate environment. His reasoning focuses less on domestic competition and shifts its gaze outward: He noted that Chinese firms have excessively lengthy growth targets while American companies operate on a much shorter leash.

Indeed, in Clinton's findings a decade ago, she noted that more than half of corporate executives would avoid long-term investments if they caused short-term target misses in upcoming quarterly earnings reports. With a longer interval, companies might focus more of their efforts on driving long-term improvements to products, services, or internal research that ultimately benefits consumers.

While there are reasons to believe that longer reporting windows might be good for business, the potential for abuse, volatility, and murkiness is also drastically increased. It's not likely that two reports instead of the current four would ultimately save enough time and money to make a legitimate difference in this pursuit.

Delayed insights and volatility in the market — which the Wall Street fear gauge highlights — are a core issue here. Companies already deploy a range of practices to shift negative information into the background of their reporting or delay the release of certain data points. With fewer reports to go on, investors and consumers will be working with already murky information at times, but have fewer check-ins to use as they interact with the marketplace of products, services, and investments. For example, investors often focus on P/E ratio as a key indicator of company value and stock trajectory. This is a simple mathematical equation that measures price against earnings per share, but it requires these underlying data points to be available to make a calculation. With fewer reports throughout the year, investors will have a harder time tracking short-term market movements. Executives with up-to-date knowledge aren't limited in this way, though, and experts therefore warn that this change could result in more frequent insider trading.