We’re in month six of 2025, which is to say nearly halfway through the year.

So far, US assets are laggards, including the “asset” that is the dollar itself.

The leaderboard (below) scarcely needs a voiceover, but just in case: US stocks are underperforming massively, where that means by ~17.5ppt versus RoW DMs ex-Canada and by ~7.5ppt versus EM shares.

Gold’s the obvious standout. Much as he loves bullion, I doubt this is what Trump had in mind when he promised a “golden age” for America. Not that he cares personally, newly-minted crypto magnate that he is.

“Long US dollar is the summer pain trade, but [we stay] long weak-dollar plays, such as gold, emerging markets and international stocks,” BofA’s Michael Hartnett said, in the latest installment of his popular weekly “Flow Show” series.

On Friday, Trump insisted things have never been better for the US. “AMERICA IS HOT! SIX MONTHS AGO IT WAS COLD AS ICE!” he shouted, between berating Jerome Powell and announcing a new round of China trade talks across nearly a dozen white-knuckle social media proclamations.

America’s hot all right. Burning actually. It’s a raging dumpster fire. Just ask Thursday, when the world’s richest man and the president he helped elect “behave[d] in a manner that showed a serious lack of judgement,” as JonesTrading’s Mike O’Rourke put it, in a rather generous description of the Musk-Trump falling out.

The good news is, US equities are a semblance of buoyant again. The S&P was back above 6,000 Friday for the first time since February.

As the figure shows, the Trump bear market (which, lest we should forget, at one point saw the S&P fall 15% in 15 hours of cash trading) is very nearly recouped.

In the context of the “Trump collar,” it was encouraging to see The White House announce something constructive vis-à-vis trade with China. Typically, Trump sees equity rallies as a green light to re-escalate, a behavior pattern predictable enough to trigger en masse call overwriting on the approach to SPX 6000.

Still, questions outnumber answers by a wide margin, and on every important front. Every reprieve feels tenuous.

Hartnett described the zeitgeist among bond bears as follows: “Trump cuts taxes like a Republican, spends like a Democrat, DOGE was a bust, tariffs are a bust, so [the] only way he gets the deficit down to 3% of GDP is via max-pumping GDP and hoping Scott Bessent can sweet talk the vigilantes.” Stock bulls, he went on, argue 2025’s “like the ’80s deregulation boom and the ’90s tech boom all at the same time.”

If you ask BofA, bonds are a better buy yielding 5% than the S&P trading north of 6,000. I won’t argue with that. I won’t endorse it either, but… well, suffice to say the Fed would find an excuse to cap long-end US yields >5.50%. And bad as things are politically in America, it’s still hard for me to imagine yields don’t fall in a US recession scenario.

Oh, and in addition to announcing trade talks with Xi’s envoys (set for Monday in London), Trump provided another important update on Friday: Plans for a grandiose new dance hall at The White House are taking shape.

“Just inspected the site of the new Ballroom that will be built, compliments of a man known as Donald J. Trump,” he said, adding that US presidents “have wanted a beautiful Ballroom for 150 years.” Alas, that dream was never realized “because nobody previously had any knowledge or experience in doing such things,” Trump explained. “But I do, like maybe nobody else.”

What can you say? Beyond parody.