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Trump Raises Tariffs On China, Thanks You For Your ‘Attention To This Matter’
Donald Trump waited until after the closing bell sounded on Wall Street to announce his response to China's retaliatory tariffs.
That's not a coincidence. US stocks plunged on Friday, and the steep losses pushed the S&P to a fourth consecutive weekly decline.
The nightmare session was almost solely attributable to the president's tweets, which, among other things, equated the Fed chair with a Communist autocrat and commanded US businesses to immediately find new suppliers.
Read more: On W
What was equally concerning today though was the market reaction to China tariffs and the subsequent Powell speech. Tariffs and now outright trade bans and barriers, are a whole different level of threat regardless of projections to GDP impact or earnings that some banks love to underestimate, and cuts a complete different kind of relief to the pain that tariffs are causing. The two surely can’t be treated the same in terms of news impact, at least a normal human would not. But it seems there are no humans left in any of the trading desks, or maybe they are all gathered trading and watching the bond market to care what equities do. Stocks recovered almost all the loses from tariff announcement which was completely bonkers, not only did the algos bid the futures markets in the US, they actually started bidding HK futures as well, while it was certain that trump will retaliate to the retaliation if not today then during the weekend, and HK markets on monday would be the most vulnerable. I don’t remember a time in all my years where markets where this complacent and wilfully stupid. A soulless market without any meaningful feedback, algos catch a headline and trade it. Today was equal to algos catching a headline that some nuclear warhead was headed straight at them, but decided to buy once Powell said nothing and decided to cut interest rates in September. It’s crazy. But hey…Thank you for your attention to this matter…Goodness gracious, a half resuscitated donkey, an imbecile, a dangling testicle controls the fate of the world practically.
The Xi administration’s strategy here is quite obvious. They set the news to break as Powell was going to speak and Trump was heading to the G7, knowing that Trump would over react and put himself into an impossible position. High fives in Beijing. Now we get to watch as he screeches and attempts to weasel his way out of it.
You would think 2/3rds of Congress would be corrupted enough by multinational corporate donors to wrest control of tariff policy away from Twitter like the Founders intended.
Trump must have lost Jamie Dimon’s telephone number.
I can hardly wait for Trump’s message to the G7:
“Hey, you guys and gals (original was “stupid socialsits”), don’t lower those interest rates ! ZIRP and negative rates just don’t work !
This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The question is: Does Trump exit gracefully or does he get the bum’s rush like the Homer Stokes character in “Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?’
Is Mitch on drugs?
@PaulMiller: right on spot, you even got the wrong spelling right – chapeau!
@mfn: Never has he ever done anything “gracefully”. One can only assume that’s not gonna change
He forgot the H in ‘sits’.