Can you make grown men and women (and equities) weep tears of joy by implementing the highest tariff rates since the 1930s Smoot-Hawley? The answer is yes, you can, as long as it is preceded by the threat of incredibly high, onerous tariffs.
“Slightly lower taxes for some, similar taxes for others” doesn’t sound like an exciting policy platform. But any time we’re talking about a major U.S. tax and spending bill, the stakes are high.
The question going forward is what this self-inflicted tariff uncertainty will morph into as time goes on. Will tariffs prove to be a mere inconvenience to U.S. consumers and corporations, with these entities being able to absorb and navigate the impacts without a significant hit to the economy?
The U.S. economy sustained a significant shock on Liberation Day, one that has already shown up clearly in consumer and business survey data. We now brace for the impact on corporate earnings and real economic activity, assuming the tariffs are not withdrawn in the interim.
This week felt like a breakup on two fronts: first, the trading relationship between the U.S. and China on the trade front, and second, the financial relationship between U.S. financial assets and the rest of the world’s desire to hold them.
Much like the exasperated runner at the end of Radiohead’s iconic “Karma Police” music video, this week President Trump effectively threw a lit match into a stream of gasoline that was connected to global markets.
The Street has started coming around to our view of more challenged equity market returns and lower GDP growth for the year, singing “Goodbye, Sunshine” to bright S&P 500 targets and cutting estimates for the full year. The median YE 2025 forecast for the S&P 500 has been trimmed from 6,600 in mid-February to 6,430 today (Bloomberg).
Spring has barely sprung, but our expectations for wide and choppy ranges in both interest rates and stock prices in 2025 have already been met…and then some. What markets do on a day-to-day basis – and what new policy announcements may drive them – has begun to feel like a coin toss.
Individual fear is an inevitable emotion when markets are lurching lower and headlines are filled with talk of recession, but as the above analysis shows, when aggregate fear spikes and becomes the consensus emotion, it usually behooves investors to find that “long overdue immunity” to their own individual fears and embrace contrarian optimism.
Investors have now lived through several weeks of heightened market volatility, driven primarily by a combination of disappointing economic data and erratic policymaking. As we’ll point out in this piece, the amount of market churn – especially intraday – has been unusually high while the peak-to-trough declines in most major indexes have not…at least, not yet.