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Avoid The Tails, Stick The Landing
For traders and investors (and yes, those are two distinct classes of market participants), the biggest takeaway from this week's key inflation data out of the US was the removal of the uber-hawkish monetary policy tail risk.
In simple terms, relatively benign reads on producer prices and core consumer prices allayed (overblown) fears of a return to rate hikes, and put two rate cuts back on the table as the most likely 2025 outcome.
Post-CPI, the assumption is that even if the US economy conti
According to our new Treasury Secretary, the left-tail scenario is assured if the Trump tax cuts aren’t extended. Apparently, “if we do not fix these tax cuts, if we do not renew and extend, we will be facing an economic calamity. And as always with financial instability, that falls on the middle-class people.” So basically, give the wealthy their tax cuts because if we don’t, the poors will suffer.
Oh, the humanity!
Yeah, I can’t subject readers to a live-blog of every Trump nominee confirmation hearing. Those are just circuses.
The poor are guilty of poor decisions and poor man’s thinking. Therefore they deserve to have taxes raised on them.
TAX THE POOR.
The prospect of large tariffs have faded away to wherever lost tails go, it seems?
Or investors have quickly swallowed the part of Trumponomics that says tariffs don’t increase domestic prices because this is Trump II not Trump I?
Hmm. Bessent in interview last weekend: “Tariffs cannot be inflationary because if the price of one thing goes up, unless you give people more money, then they have less money to spend on the other thing, so there is no inflation.”
Putting aside his 2024 letter to clients that flatly said tariffs are inflationary, has he heard of “price vs quantity”, “substitution”, and “savings”?
Maybe this is why he now manages about 1/20th of the capital he launched with.
Anyway, at least it’s clear. The next Treasury secretary doesn’t expect ordinary people’s incomes to rise.