“We’re going to start sending letters out to various countries tomorrow.”

So said Donald Trump on Thursday, while regaling reporters with some of his trademark tariff balderdash. Now it’s Friday, which is to say “tomorrow,” and that presumably means “various countries” received a letter from Howard Lutnick and/or Scott Bessent detailing the rate those countries will pay to “do business with America,” as Trump’s fond of putting it.

What are those rates? Well, who knows. We’ll find out soon enough, but for whatever his word’s worth (nothing), Trump said they’ll range from “maybe” as high as 70% to as low as 10%. Note that 70% would be significantly higher than the most onerous of the rates Trump displayed on a piece of poster board handed him by Lutnick during the infamous April 2 “Liberation Day” unveil at The White House.

I can only assume no one who “counts” (where that just means none of America’s largest trading partners) will be hit with a 70% levy. Negotiations are ongoing with Europe and Japan, and Trump’s already backed down on embargo-level tariffs for China. He announced a deal with Vietnam earlier this week, and discussions with Canada are back on after Mark Carney scrapped a digital service tax.

So, again, anyone hit with a duty on the order of 60% or 70% is probably going to be someone who doesn’t actually do a lot of trading with America anyway. Like, say, the Heard and McDonald Islands. Or the Galápagos. (“Those iguanas have been taking advantage of our country for many years. It stops right now.”)

In the same remarks to reporters, Trump said as many as a dozen letters were going out on July 4, and that by July 9 (when his 90-day “pause” expires), “they’ll be fully covered.” It wasn’t clear who “they” is, but I suppose he just meant that everyone who’s going to get a letter will have it by then.

I mention this because, as discussed in “What’s The Bear Case Now?,” Trump has a lot of SPX points to play with if he’s inclined to dial up the tariff tension next week in and around the expiration of the 90-day “pause.”

I don’t know that he actually is so inclined. He and Bessent were keen in recent weeks to encourage and facilitate the stock rally rather than use it as an excuse / opportunity to re-escalate, but if there’s a near-term bear case that’s it: Trump.

1,000 investors from 400 institutions who attended JPMorgan’s 34th Global Quantitative Conference in New York agree. The event, held last month, polled attendees on their views covering every macro-market topic under the sun. The simple figure below gives you a sense of what professional investors are worried about.

As you can see, the top worry is just Trump and things to do with him.

“Most investors, around 50%, feel tariff re-escalation and government policies are the greatest risk to the market,” the bank said, in an 85-page recap of the conference sent to clients on July 3.

A couple of additional notables from the survey: A narrow majority (56%) attributed dollar weakness to deficits and fiscal policies, versus 20% who think the greenback’s in a secular decline and 14% who suggested markets are concerned about the dollar’s haven status. When asked which global equity market will be the best performer in the back half of the year, Europe won a plurality of the vote with 36%. 32% said the S&P.

Coming back to Trump, he indicated that the tariff rates dictated in his “letters” won’t go into effect until August 1. I guess that’s the new “deadline.”

Bessent recently suggested some countries will have until Labor Day to negotiate a final deal. Who knows if that’s true. Asked about that during a CNBC cameo, Bessent said, “We’re going to do what the president wants.”

That’s the GOP mantra on pretty much everything these days. Increasingly, it describes the Supreme Court’s modus operandi too.