Late last month, it looked like at least one Wall Street firm was ready to throw in the towel when it comes to making sense of U.S. trade policy.
Specifically, a frustrated BofAML threw up their hands and employed the most famous Trumpism of them all, branding the administration’s strategy “covfefe”:
LOL pic.twitter.com/dnK4vlrDff
— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) June 22, 2018
Needless to say, things haven’t improved since June 22.
In fact, the situation has deteriorated markedly.
With just days to go until the July 6 deadline for striking a truce with China, Trump appears more unapologetic than ever and according to Wilbur Ross, there’s no magic number on the Dow that would prompt a change of heart from the President.
There’s goes your “Trump put”, folks. You better hope Jerome Powell channels his inner Janet Yellen.
For what it’s worth, here are a series of annotated charts from Wells Fargo that mark important points in the evolution of the trade war:
And so, with this game of chicken all set to end in a tragic, head-on collision, BofAML’s David Woo (who knows something about “games of chicken”) is out with what amounts to a lament for an opportunity lost on that other trade issue: NAFTA.
“The failure of the US to get a NAFTA deal before the Mexican election and the Canadian retaliatory tariffs went into effect is forcing us to conclude that a market correction may be necessary to reduce the likelihood of a further escalation of trade wars”, Woo writes, in a note dated Monday.
One wonders if he penned those words before or after he heard Wilbur explicitly state that Trump isn’t going to blink no matter what happens to the stock market.
What you’ll read below is Woo attempting to make sense of things and admitting, along the way, that we may have all been wrong to give this administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to negotiating in good faith with an eye towards a resolution.
We’re sorry, David – we really, really are.
Via BofAML
This strategist had held out hope until the end:
- We had assumed that pragmatism would prevail and that the hard deadline imposed by the Mexican presidential election would force a last-minute deal that was better than no deal.
- We had assumed that getting a NAFTA deal would be seen by the Trump administration as strengthening its position in its negotiation with China.
- We had assumed that Canada and Mexico, as smaller economies and highly dependent on the US economy, had more to lose than the US in an all-out trade war.
We were wrong about the outcome and it is even possible that we were wrong about all our assumptions:
- In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, President Trump said that he “could sign it [NAFTA] tomorrow” but he said he was “not happy with it.”
- When Bartiromo asked Trump whether it made more sense to get “all our allies to together go against China” rather than “pushing on” them, he said that the European Union was “possibly as bad as China except smaller”.
- On Sunday, Canada’s $16.6bn worth of retaliatory tariffs on US goods went into effect. This is despite the risk that Washington could respond by imposing new auto tariffs. Trump said on Sunday that “I’m going to tax their cars coming into America and that’s the big one…. We can talk steel, we can talk everything: the big thing is the cars.”
These developments lead us to the below conclusions:
- If Washington cannot close a relatively easy deal like NAFTA, it is probably safe to assume that it is far from closing a deal with China. This means that the chances for a breakthrough before July 6 (when US tariffs on $34bn of Chinese goods and retaliatory Chinese tariffs on US goods both go into effect) are slim.
- Canadian defiance may suggest that Ottawa has decided to call Trump’s bluff (especially with the mid-term elections only four months away) and we cannot rule out that this could lead other countries to dig in too.
- The Trump administration might have decided that the relative strength of the US economy compared with the rest of the world may give it more leverage in a war of attrition. This means that we may need a meaningful market correction to force a compromise.
All of the above would suggest that (1) there is no resolution in sight (President Trump said that he will not sign a NAFTA deal “until after the midterm elections”) and (2) the risk of escalation of trade wars has risen.
The very smarrrt evil genius is really a loser and thief in drag. This is turning into a typical trump cluster-fuck. Folks this man lost a bunch of cash cow casinos, the most cheated tax scams in the world. What???? makes anyone think he knows what (I’m the only one who can fix our economy) the fuck he is doing, really, come on.
Republicans have sold their souls and are all in right up to the midterms, vote them and any democrat that goes along with this insanity OUT. Vote, wherever and whenever there is an election, come on pay attention. Elections are ongoing almost every week, so get involved in your own community and get rid of this scourge now and anytime you can, vote.
We are losing our republic every day these crooks stay in office. Look who supports this slime, they do not give a shit about your lives, never have and never will. Come vote………..
There is a vague semblance of pragmatism (even if accidental) to trump’s actions, but David Woo was looking for sense in all the wrong places. Trump is merely using the trade war as a political tool to embolden the false victimhood of his ignorant base in hopes of turning the tide in what is presently looking very likely to be a sweep out of the Republican control of both houses and potentially the follow on impeachment. The fact that the trade war will likely hurt trump’s base more than any other is irrelevant, logic means very little to these people.
Just as the tax plan was an attempt to rig the short term economic condition to win the 2018 elections for the Rs, the economic destruction from the trade war is a hedge by trump against getting impeached less the economy tank (which it is nearly guaranteed to do in 2019) shortly after the new House and Senate are confirmed in Jan 2019. The Dems (if the presumed happens) will not want to inevitable tanking of the economy to be on their watch so they need trump in office through 2020 to blame and they want a tired and wounded trump running in 2020. The Dems would presumably look to play it all out by passing legislation (daily if necessary) to outlaw most of trump’s actions.
Regarding the absence of a US equity put, i will believe it when I see it.
The US equity market is like Rocky on steroids. It keeps getting hit and goes down, but gets picked right back up. It’s got the Fed, and The wealthy politicians, and tax cuts, and share repurchasing, and fiscal stimulus, and so on……The US economy is fine.
The Trump administration could care less about MAGA ideologies related to “balancing long standing trade deficits”. Wilbur states that these are long standing issues that need to be corrected. I’d like to see him in a few weeks or months if the US equity markets take a hit like over in China. His resolve has nothing on China. Wilbur’s a very wealthy man, and you won’t see the same stoicism on his face with a nice good old fashioned 20-30% US market correction.
The fact that we’ve got more equity market “resilience” than our friends in China is exactly what the Trump strategy is counting on. That’s all that really matters to them.
Let’s see how this works out in the next few months….They’ll “put” the market and won’t follow through and they’ll once again settle for more watered down MAGA ideology.
The funny part:: Trump will proclaim ideological victory regardless of the outcome. I guess we can call this Trumpinian economics.
Absolutely astounding that anyone with one working brain cell cannot see this man has no clue what he is doing — he thinks he is on a reality TV show! It is all a game to him. He’s writing the script as he goes along.
He craves hearing his name on TV every day and being subject of the non-stop talk on the news. It pumps him up to do it again, all day tomorrow. Putin saw it, sees it, works it. The people we call his base are the biggest suckers of all and worship him and say he is “for real” and “he says it like it is”.
I wonder every day what he will do ‘today’ and will this be the ‘one’ that takes him down at last.