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April 2025 DDD

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With the U.S. economy shifting toward stagflation, the central question for the Federal Reserve will be which half gets worse: the stag- or the -flation.
Why it matters: The central bank faces challenges on both sides of its dual mandate — the responsibility to seek both stable prices and maximum employment.
  • Fed officials say they will assess on which side of the mandate they are most coming up short.
The big picture: Most forecasters think a recessionary impulse in the economy will be powerful enough (and trade war-driven, inflation-temporary enough) that the Fed's next move will be rate cuts to support the job market — even if those cuts won't come quickly enough for Trump's taste.
  • But Fed officials have avoided committing themselves to that approach, leaving open the possibility that the next move could be a rate hike to combat inflation.
  • Indeed, modeling of the trade war's effects points to 2025 inflation being considerably further from the Fed's goals than the unemployment rate.
What they're saying: "We may find ourselves in the challenging scenario in which our dual-mandate goals are in tension," Powell said last week.
  • "If that were to occur, we would consider how far the economy is from each goal, and the potentially different time horizons over which those respective gaps would be anticipated to close," he said.
Zoom in: Some simple math shows how those numbers may look by the end of the year.
  • The unemployment rate was 4.2% last month, which is also the level that the median Fed official sees as its long-term rate. So the maximum employment mandate is, for the moment, being achieved.
  • The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the tariff policies currently in place, if sustained, would raise the unemployment rate by 0.6 percentage point by year-end, which implies a 4.8% jobless rate.
  • The impact on inflation would be considerably higher in the Yale group's models, fueling a 1.6 percentage point rise in the price level. That's even after adjusting for "substitution effects," in which activity shifts toward lower-tariff and domestically made goods.
The intrigue: Inflation is already running above the Fed's goals, with the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index up 2.5% for the 12 months ended in February.
  • Even if you use a more generous baseline, assuming that in a non-trade-war world inflation would be 2% this year, tariffs are on track to push the economy further from the Fed's price stability mandate than its maximum employment mandate, at least temporarily.
Reality check: There's a lot going on aside from trade — particularly a volatile financial market environment, as well as slumping business and consumer confidence — that could change the landscape over the years ahead.
  • Moreover, as Powell's quote above indicates, the Fed won't be exclusively using some mechanical analysis of how far it is from each goal, but rather will factor in how persistent those divergences are likely to be.
The bottom line: "Our modeling suggests the Fed should look through" a one-time shift in prices due to tariffs, Martha Gimbel with the Yale Budget Lab tells Axios.
  • "But that doesn't account for changes in expectations or contagion from financial markets," she adds. "Expectations are the ballgame right now, and that makes it particularly important that the Fed is able to signal that it's going to keep inflation under control."




A summary from CNBC

Stocks fell again on Monday as President Donald Trump ramped up his attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, raising questions about the central bank’s independence, while traders received little signs of progress on global trade talks.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded 1,170 points lower, or 3%. The S&P 500 shed 3.1%, and the Nasdaq Composite lost 3.3%.
“Magnificent Seven” tech titans dragged the major indexes lower, with Teslaand Nvidia respectively losing 7% and 6%. Amazon shed 4%, as did Advanced Micro Devices and Meta Platforms. Equipment manufacturer Caterpillar declined 3%.

In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed that the economy would slow unless Powell — who he referred to as “Mr. Too Late, a major loser” — lowered interest rates immediately. This follows another post last week in which Trump also called for the Fed to lower rates, even hinting at Powell’s “termination” — something White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said the president’s team was studying.

The dollar was also under pressure, hitting a three-year low as the threats ramped up. Gold, meanwhile, soared to record highs above $3,400 per ounce.

“One of the things that is becoming very clear is the underlying tension between the Fed and the administration,” said Michael Green, chief strategist of Simplify Asset Management. “We are effectively in a replay of COVID. The uncertainty has meaningfully disrupted trade ... I think most people anticipate that there will be some form of stimulus that ultimately emerges to offset the effects of the tariff.”

Lack of progress on trade​

Investor confidence was also hurt by a lack of progress on global trade. If anything, tensions seemed to increase with China with the country warning other nations not to strike any deal with the U.S. that would hurt China.

The S&P 500 is down more than 8% since since April 2, when Trump announced a raft of levies on imports from other countries. The Nasdaq has lost nearly 10% in that time, and the Dow has fallen 9%.

“We’re really thinking about this as a bit of an endless environment in terms of direction ... and that’s in particular because we just don’t know where tariffs end up,” said Robert Haworth, senior investment strategist at U.S. Bank, in an interview with CNBC. “This is a market trying to get clarity on direction, and not getting a lot of conclusions.”

Haworth added: “If uncertainty continues for an extended period of time — meaning multiple quarters — I think that becomes more challenging for corporate earnings and decision making, and we’ve seen some of that in the earnings season so far.”


So what do I think?


Investors’ comments (broad media) reveal that they do not realize that what they see as a flaw of Trump policy is actually the goal.

Trump (Miran, Bessent) closed the USD financial asset window (capital flows) two weeks ago with a goal of weakening the USD to make the US more competitive globally and reshoring the US defense industrial base by redirecting capital flows out of US financial assets into gold and eventually, US infrastructure.

They have begun taking steps to do exactly this. Force foreigners to redirect US deficits out of US equities and bonds into gold and eventually, US infrastructure. Markets have begun reacting as if this has begun happening, but most investors do not realize it yet.

In the short run, this is good for gold, T-Bills, and volatility, and bad for the USD and equities. Ultimately, what the Trump Administration is attempting to pull off is great for America and the global economy but bad for the real value of LT USTs and other bonds.

If it works.

If it does not work (and there are starting to be very disconcerting signs of supply chain breakdown in the US. The only assets I would have positions in as long positions, would be gold and T-Bills.

Of course the difficulty is that as has been said many times before: bear market rallies (volatility) are vicious, come out of nowhere and can really hurt short positions.

Being short in a bear market is not the same as being long in a bull market. If you are going to be short, be short via the Options market and hold Puts. Do not short stock directly. Far too risky.

I have also noticed a number of 'guru's' who advocated selling 'naked Puts' are no longer with us. They will be missed. Selling naked Calls is the same mistake, just even more dangerous in a bear. Your life expectancy will be lower.

jog on
duc
 
Trump unleashed a global trade war that taps into many Americans' frustrations about the negative economic effects of free trade. The IMF's chief economist says it isn't quite that simple.
What they're saying: "In many advanced economies, there is an acute perception that globalization unfairly displaced many domestic manufacturing jobs," Gourinchas wrote in a blog post.
  • "There is some merit to these grievances, even if the share of manufacturing employment in advanced economies has been in a secular decline in countries running trade surpluses, like Germany, or deficits, like the United States," he added.
Technological progress and automation is the "deeper force behind this decline" of manufacturing employment, Gourinchas wrote.
  • In both the U.S. and Germany, employment has withered, but each nation's share of manufacturing output has held steady.
What to watch: "This requires that policymakers think well beyond the reductive lens of compensating transfers between 'winners' and 'losers,' be it of technological revolutions or globalization," Gourinchas wrote.
  • There has been a "zero-sum worldview" that the gains of some countries come at the expense of others, he says.
The bottom line: The IMF says Trump's attack on globalization is not totally baseless. But steep protectionist policies — like tariffs — risk permanently undoing the gains from more trade.



Oil News:

The start of trade negotiations between the United States and Asia Pacific countries has been marked by evident interest in US LNG projects, whilst the likes of South Korea and Japan kept relatively mum about crude.

- Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te announced that Taipei would seek to increase the share of US LNG imports from the current 10% to 33%, potentially discontinuing some term supplies from Australia and Qatar.

- South Korea, too, is considering a 20-25% increase in US LNG imports, currently accounting for 12% of its liquefied gas needs, seeking to wind down Qatari contractual commitments that are linked to Brent rather than traded against JKM or Henry Hub.

- China is moving in the opposite direction, completely halting its imports of US LNG in March and signing three long-term deals with the UAE for the supply of liquefied gas over the next 10 years, seeking further term options in the region.

Market Movers

- US investor James Cameron has offered $5 billion to buy Kazakhstan’s mining giant Eurasian Resources Group, 40% part-owned by the Kazakh government, as the miner intends to expand into rare earths.

- UK energy firm BP (NYSE:BP) has become the only foreign oil company to bid in India’s OALP-IX bidding round, landing the most coveted GS-OSHP block alongside Indian partners Reliance and ONGC.

- US oil major Chevron (NYSE:CVX) is reportedly looking to divest some of its upstream interests in Angola, potentially exiting Block 14K that currently produces some 42,000 b/day across Angola and Congo.

- Argentina’s second-largest oil company, Vista Energy (NYSE:VIST), bought Petronas’ 50% stake in the La Amarga Chica shale play in the country’s Vaca Muerta basin for a total of $1.5 billion.

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Oil producers are preparing for another external shock to oil markets as Brent futures took some collateral damage from Monday’s equity sell-off and remain pressured by the prospect of a potential US-Iran nuclear deal. For the time being, the $66-67 per barrel price for ICE Brent seems to be a temporary resting place for crude before the next big thing happens.

Rome Hosts High-Level Nuclear Talks. Negotiators from the United States and Iran met in Italy’s capital, Rome, over the weekend to continue negotiations started a week ago in Oman over Tehran’s nuclear programme, with both sides lauding the progress the talks had made over the past week.

US Wants to Make the Gulf Great Again. As the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management recently upped the Gulf of America’s untapped reserves to 5.77 billion barrels, the Trump administration has launched a new 5-year offshore oil and gas leasing plan, which might include blocks in the Arctic.

Gold Continues to Edge Higher. Amidst widespread speculation of Donald Trump wanting to fire US Fed chair Jerome Powell, gold prices touched $3,500 per ounce for the first time on record in Tuesday’s intraday trading, up 32% since the beginning of the year.

China Loads Up On Middle Eastern LNG. China’s state-controlled oil majors CNOOC and Zhenhua Oil, as well as privately owned ENN Natural Gas, have all signed term deals with the UAE’s state oil company ADNOC, ranging from 5 to 15 years and coming into effect as early as 2026.

Egypt’s Hyped Exploration Boom Fails. An array of international energy firms have exited their respective concessions in Egypt’s offshore zone in the Red Sea after US oil firm Chevron relinquished its stake in Block 1, with rumours also suggesting Shell is set to give up on the adjacent Block 3.

P66 Fights Back Against Activist Investor. Leading US refiner Phillips 66 (NYSESX) has issued a letter demanding that activist investor Elliott Investment Management back down from its push to break up the company due to a conflict of interest, as it is separately seeking to buy distressed Citgo.

India Slaps Tariffs on Chinese Steel. The government of India announced a 12% tariff on some steel imports from China that would be valid for the next 200 days, arguing that a flood of cheaper Chinese steel products put domestic mills under immense pressure and forced job cuts.

South Korea Dreams Big to Impress Trump. South Korea’s leading steel manufacturer, Posco Holdings (NYSEKX), is reportedly planning to join its peer, Hyundai Motor Group (KRX:005380), to build a $5.8 billion steel mill in the US, expected to start operations in 2029 in Louisiana.

Using Oil, Russia Seeks to Stay in Syria. The ouster of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has led to a complete halt in Iranian oil deliveries to the Levantine nation. In its stead, Damascus has opted for Russian crude and diesel deliveries as Moscow wants to keep its Tartus naval base.

China’s Copper Grows Despite Low Profits. Chinese production of refined copper surged to 1.25 million tonnes in March, up 8.6% from a year ago and hitting a new all-time monthly high, with minimal profitability somewhat cushioned by higher gold prices, a co-product of copper smelting.

Saudi Aramco Eyes Automotive Roles. Saudi Aramco, the national oil firm of Saudi Arabia, inked a deal with China’s leading EV producer BYD (SHE:002594) to develop new energy vehicle technologies, seeking to benefit from the proliferation of battery-powered cars across Asia.

Heavy Rains Resuscitate Rhine Shipping. Easter precipitation has finally allowed German shippers to transport full cargoes along the River Rhine, the country’s main energy transportation artery, with water levels in Kaub rising by 40% to 125cm.

Morocco to Build an LNG Import Terminal. The North African country of Morocco is preparing to begin tendering procedures for its first-ever liquefaction terminal, to be located in the port of Nador, as its gas requirements are expected to soar from 1 Bcm currently to 8 Bcm by 2027.


From JC's team:


One of the things you always hear Allstarcharts Chairman JC Parets talking about is that we don't have bull markets around here without Financials.

This is a key sector for markets, not just in the United States, but all over the world.

It starts with credit.

If there is real credit risk out there, you're going to see it impacting the Financials stocks.

Here's a look at the S&P500 Large-cap Financials Index, which is dominated by names like Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America and others.
​

This 47 - 47.50 level is a big one.

We call this "Overhead Supply", meaning that so far, the sellers have proven that they're overwhelming the buyers near those prices.

In other words, there is more "Supply" for this Index ETF at these prices than there is "Demand" for it.

As long as that remains the case, I would expect the choppiness across the major indexes to persist.

The ability for markets to take Financials higher from here, would be a major development for the bulls, and would likely mean that we are, in fact, out of the proverbial woods.

We'll be monitoring these levels closely, and we would encourage you to do the same!


Time-capsule headline: "The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed almost 1,000 points on Monday and is headed for its worst April performance since 1932," The Wall Street Journal reports (gift link).

  • "The S&P 500's performance since Inauguration Day is now the worst for any president up to this point in data going back to 1928 [the year before the Great Depression began], according to Bespoke Investment Group."





VWAP's:


Monday, April 21, 2025
​
First of all, congrats to Goldman Sachs, now the largest component in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The last time a bank headlined the Dow was JP Morgan back in 1998.

That’s pretty cool, but that’s all it is. Just a fun fact.

I would say it’s a sign of the times that a tech stock didn’t fill the shoes of UNH, but the Dow is a bit funky in the sense that it is price-weighted instead of cap-weighted.

Speaking of Papa Dow, let’s talk about what’s next for the major averages following the latest beating for US equities.

All the large-cap indexes violated their VWAPs anchored from the April 7 pivot lows this morning. They all tested these levels and held just last week.

That’s been the line in the sand for me as far as a retest of the lows is concerned.

With every day the S&P, Nasdaq, and Dow are below these VWAPs, the higher the likelihood we’re headed back to the lows from a few weeks ago. In fact, it probably happens pretty fast.

On last week’s live stream, we discussed our broader market outlook and pounded the table on the importance of the VWAPs from the pivot lows holding.

We said if they get taken out, we’re heading lower. That happened this morning, and stocks tanked all day before recovering a bit in the final hour.

Here’s a zoomed-in look:
​
If this damage isn’t repaired immediately, expect the selling to continue with the next stop at the early April lows.

And it’s actually a lot more than just a short-term low. These are monster levels as they also represent the prior-cycle highs.

You need to zoom out a bit to show the true significance of these polarity zones.

370 in the Dow $DIA
405 in the Nasdaq $QQQ
480 in the S&P $SPY

It’s where these indexes peaked and rolled over back in early 2022.

This would mean another 6-7% of downside left in SPY & QQQ, but only about 2.5% for DIA.

Without a swift reclaim of those VWAP levels, that’s where things are headed.

And the real test is what happens when we get there.

Not only is there serious price memory from the prior-cycle highs, but the primary trend VWAPs also line up there for all the major averages.

This means that the average buyer since the beginning of the bull market will be underwater, or losing money, on their position. It is as important of a level as you will find.

Here’s a look at the S&P 500 with the VWAP anchored from the bear market low in 2022:
​
Notice how this VWAP put a floor in the corrective waves from Q1 and Q3 2023. Can it do it again this time?

If not, I expect the current selloff to get much worse before anything gets better. This kind of price action would jive with a much deeper and darker bear market than the one we’re in now.

Hold onto your seats and obey your VWAPs. They never let us down.

And don’t worry about the bear market. In the event that’s where we’re going, we’ll get short at these big levels just like we did in early March when the August VWAPs gave way.



  • The S&P 500 ($SPX) is down -8.1% in April with seven trading days remaining, putting it on pace for its worst month since September 2022.
  • Steve points out that when the S&P 500 falls -5% or more in April, the rest of the year has historically been challenging. This has happened 13 other times since 1950.
  • Over the next three months, $SPX was higher just 23% of the time, with an average loss of -4%. One-year returns were only slightly better than a coin toss, with $SPX higher 54% of the time for an average gain of just +3.2%.
The Takeaway: When the S&P 500 has dropped -5% or more in April, the remainder of the year has historically leaned bearish.




China:


China’s electricity production and road traffic congestion data have already been signaling a strong economic slow-down in China over the last 6 months.

However, the current sudden reduction in China’s exports due to its tariff battle with the US is going to have an outsized impact on China due to the sudden removal of a benefit that China has received from the West for decades.

China exports $3.6 trillion (T) of goods annually generating an annual trade surplus of $820 billion (B).

However, the export figures hide one vital factor - the vast majority of China’s exports are manufactured goods and manufacturing provide a tremendous economic benefit through the manufacturing multiplier effect.

But today, the bite of tariffs are hitting China in a very real way:

“Just days before the new tariffs took effect, Chinese ports, including Shanghai’s Yangshan and Waigaoqiao terminals, were flooded with activity as cargo ships rushed to complete shipments before the deadline.

However, with the deadline passed, these once-bustling ports have seen operations come to an almost complete standstill.

Similar disruptions have been reported in Guangdong’s Yantian terminal, a critical shipping hub in Shenzhen.

Local business owners, including one from Guangdong who witnessed the slowdown firsthand in Shanghai, reported containers piling up at port facilities.”

China’s Cheaper Products Enabled The Central Bank Bubble Economy​

Through the increased supply of cheap manufactured goods from China over the past 35 years, China played an important role enabling central banks to run loose monetary policy while proclaiming there was almost no inflation even as central banks inflated numerous asset bubbles.

The second element enabling loose monetary policy was the rigging of gold and silver prices by the Bank of England which prices had historically served as a warning of monetary inflation thereby limiting central bankers’ actions.

In trading economic wealth and higher paying US jobs for cheap imported consumer goods prices, low interest rates, and asset bubbles, the US working class was left in the lurch with a declining standard of living by successive administrations.

While China faces onset of an immediate economic upending, the US faces its own approaching credit, bank, and currency crisis that was always inevitable when the central banking loose money fraud met its end.

China’s Last Card May Be Its Best Card​

It is believed that China has accumulated 20,000+ tonnes of gold since David Rockefeller’s scores of visits to China in the 1970s - far beyond China’s 2,300 tonnes it has officially declared.

As economic conditions deteriorate, China will likely face a rapid decline in the value of its yuan and thus a rapid increase in food prices. As an importer of 30% of its food and 75% of its daily oil consumption, China will face numerous challenges in purchasing these essential goods in a currency crisis.

This would likely pressure China to move to either a ‘gold yuan’ or a ‘BRICS gold unit’ medium of trade allowing China to round-up by spurring a knock-on crisis in the US dollar as gold was remonetized globally.

Of China’s 36 Stratagems, 'Remove The Fire From Under The Pot’ comes to mind.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114372102982066647

​
The New York Fed vaults 204M oz. of gold as custodian for other countries.

President Trump’s April 20 tweet is intriguing.







jog on
duc
 
The big lesson of the last 24 hours is that financial market reality remains a constraint on Trump's most aggressive impulses. But that doesn't mean the economy is out of the woods.
The big picture: Yesterday brought a presidential climbdown on both his threats to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and to slam Chinese imports with tariffs so high as to virtually shutter trade between the world's biggest economies.
  • It is an indication that for all his administration's talk about being willing to tolerate pain in order to restructure the economy, the kinds of abrupt sell-offs in U.S. assets — stocks, bonds, and the dollar — seen in the last few weeks get the president's attention.
  • However, plans to negotiate sweeping deals with dozens of major trading partners over the next 76 days create a risk of further market volatility and economic pain.
Catch up quick: Yesterday, as first scooped by Bloomberg, Bessent told a private audience of investors that the status quo — a 145% tariff on Chinese imports — amounts to essentially a trade embargo, but that the U.S. and China will de-escalate.
  • Later in the day, Trump confirmed that, saying China tariffs will "come down substantially" and that he did not expect to play hardball with the country.
  • He also said that he had "no intention" of firing Powell, after days of social media posts pillorying the Fed chief and demanding rate cuts.
Between the lines: Those developments — paired with the decision April 9 to pause reciprocal tariffs for 90 days in hopes of seeking deals with 75 other countries — show that the "Trump put," named for a financial contract that protects against losses below a certain point, remains alive.
  • The president may be willing to tolerate some market and economic pain to enact his agenda, but there is a limit to that tolerance.
  • The change in tone on China and Powell came followed steep market drops. It also came after an Oval Office meeting with top retail CEOs where, our colleague Marc Caputo reports, Trump was warned that his tariff policies would lead to higher prices and empty store shelves.
Yes, but: That doesn't mean that looming negotiations over the reciprocal tariffs will be all sunshine and rainbows. As Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok notes, it typically takes 18 months for the U.S. to negotiate a trade deal, a grinding process of give-and-take.
  • The administration is seeking to rewire the U.S. relationship with pretty much the entire world in a relative instant, something trade negotiators view as implausible.
  • Business lobbyists anticipate something along the lines of simple memoranda of understanding between the U.S. and trading partners, perhaps sharing a common template across nations.
  • In the meantime, importers face tariffs on imported goods — from nearly every nation — higher than in generations plus deep uncertainty about where they will go from here.
What they're saying: "While markets wait for trade negotiations with 90 countries at the same time, global trade is grinding to a standstill with problems similar to what we saw during Covid," Slok wrote.
  • Namely, "growing supply chain challenges with potential shortages in US stores within a few weeks, higher US inflation, and lower tourism to the US."
The bottom line: While most hard data on the economy has held up fine so far, the uncertainty generated by the trade war is hitting manufacturing and other sectors in ways that will play out across the economy in the coming months.
  • The pullback on Powell and China provides some relief to markets, but doesn't change that underlying dynamic.



The trade war with China is "unsustainable" in its current form, Bessent told reporters this morning — but the U.S. will not move unilaterally to reduce tariffs.

Why it matters: As recession worries grow, the Trump administration is signaling intentions to tamp down trade tensions with China.

  • The steep tariffs threaten to all but shutter commerce between the world's two largest economies.
What they're saying: "I think both sides believe that the current status quo is unsustainable," Bessent said after a speech at the Institute of International Finance in Washington, D.C.

  • "I think at this point there would have to be a de-escalation by both sides," he added. "I would not be surprised if they went down in a mutual way," though he said there is "no unilateral offer from the president to just de-escalate."
The intrigue: Bessent shed some light on what new tariff deal talks might look like: "A satisfactory arrangement does not necessarily mean the actual trade document," he said.

  • "It means that we have reached agreement in principle, and then we will start implementing those."
The backdrop: In a speech, Bessent demanded fixes at IMF and World Bank — the strongest hint yet that the administration will try to nudge groups to better align with the Trump agenda.





President Donald Trump’s statement last Thursday that Jerome Powell’s “termination” as chairman of the Federal Reserve “couldn’t come soon enough” set off another does of market turmoil. He now seems to have cleared up the critical question of the moment in comments to reporters:
The press runs away with things. No, I have no intention of firing him. I would like to see him be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates.
Click to expand...
So that’s all right then? It certainly drove instant relief among traders, who had been expecting to focus on Tesla Inc.’s results. This is what happened to the dollar against the yen, and to the S&P 500, in after-hours trading:

However, it would be unwise to think of this as a true turning point. Raising the possibility of firing Powell was an unforced error in the first place, and the messaging suggests chaos. The White House press secretary had amplified Trump’s criticism only hours earlier, while the actual announcement of hugely important market-sensitive information came ad hoc in response to a reporter’s question. Would the issue have been cleared up without a question?

A further reason this shouldn’t do much to restore confidence that the administration knows what it’s doing is that there’s a clear alternative waiting in the wings. Powell has to go next year anyway. The obvious replacement is Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor and investment banker.

Would Warsh make that great a difference? It’s possible. Over the years, few have been much more critical of the Fed than Albert Edwards of Societe Generale, famous as a perma-bear on the stock markets but also as someone who correctly foresaw the extended bull market in bonds. He isn’t prone to be kind about anyone in the official economics establishment.


Attention turns to Warsh. Photographer: Samuel Corum/Bloomberg

I now proffer a piece that Edwards published in October 2016, shortly before Trump was elected the first time. He’d seen Warsh speak at a BCA conference in New York, and his judgment was:
This was before Covid, the massive money-printing that followed, and the return of inflation. Back then, Jay Powell was a Fed governor, and Trump would decide to take him over Warsh late in 2017. Presumably, Trump now believes this was a mistake, even if he won’t admit it. But such a positive summation from one of the most famous market curmudgeons should establish that Warsh would represent that rare combination of genuine change with the stability of continuity. And he probably wouldn’t meekly cut rates just because the president asked him to. Which is good.

With such an obvious candidate in the wings, it was absurd for Trump to make such a fuss over the last few days. He should get no credit just for not doing something incredibly stupid. But it’s reassuring that the people who advise him seem to have been persuasive that provoking an unnecessary crisis would have been a bad idea. If the administration really wants to change the Fed, it can wait until next year with a new man in place.


​
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Today’s Points:​

No One Needed This Drama​

President Donald Trump’s statement last Thursday that Jerome Powell’s “termination” as chairman of the Federal Reserve “couldn’t come soon enough” set off another does of market turmoil. He now seems to have cleared up the critical question of the moment in comments to reporters:
The press runs away with things. No, I have no intention of firing him. I would like to see him be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates.
Click to expand...
So that’s all right then? It certainly drove instant relief among traders, who had been expecting to focus on Tesla Inc.’s results. This is what happened to the dollar against the yen, and to the S&P 500, in after-hours trading:

However, it would be unwise to think of this as a true turning point. Raising the possibility of firing Powell was an unforced error in the first place, and the messaging suggests chaos. The White House press secretary had amplified Trump’s criticism only hours earlier, while the actual announcement of hugely important market-sensitive information came ad hoc in response to a reporter’s question. Would the issue have been cleared up without a question?
A further reason this shouldn’t do much to restore confidence that the administration knows what it’s doing is that there’s a clear alternative waiting in the wings. Powell has to go next year anyway. The obvious replacement is Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor and investment banker.
Would Warsh make that great a difference? It’s possible. Over the years, few have been much more critical of the Fed than Albert Edwards of Societe Generale, famous as a perma-bear on the stock markets but also as someone who correctly foresaw the extended bull market in bonds. He isn’t prone to be kind about anyone in the official economics establishment.

Attention turns to Warsh. Photographer: Samuel Corum/Bloomberg
I now proffer a piece that Edwards published in October 2016, shortly before Trump was elected the first time. He’d seen Warsh speak at a BCA conference in New York, and his judgment was:
This was before Covid, the massive money-printing that followed, and the return of inflation. Back then, Jay Powell was a Fed governor, and Trump would decide to take him over Warsh late in 2017. Presumably, Trump now believes this was a mistake, even if he won’t admit it. But such a positive summation from one of the most famous market curmudgeons should establish that Warsh would represent that rare combination of genuine change with the stability of continuity. And he probably wouldn’t meekly cut rates just because the president asked him to. Which is good.
With such an obvious candidate in the wings, it was absurd for Trump to make such a fuss over the last few days. He should get no credit just for not doing something incredibly stupid. But it’s reassuring that the people who advise him seem to have been persuasive that provoking an unnecessary crisis would have been a bad idea. If the administration really wants to change the Fed, it can wait until next year with a new man in place.
​
​

The Dollar Does a W​

Putting the brief Powell tempest to one side, is this a turning point for the dollar? And if so, in which direction? This week has already brought plenty to support any narrative you wanted. The DXY dollar index has spent two days sketching out a broad W to end almost where it closed on Friday. I drew this chart just before the Powell comments:

It’s conceivable that this is a turning point, but it could easily be in either direction. We’ve explored the logic behind the fear of a drawn-out fall for the dollar and US assets at length. The rest of the world is heavily “overweight” the US, and the effect of pulling money back home could lead to a self-fulfilling reversal of US exceptionalism.

But it’s ever-important in markets to guard against our innate tendency to extrapolate any trend before us into a straight line into the long-term future. Adam Parker, who heads Trivariate Research, makes the point that near-term price movement has typically impacted sentiment:
There are a number of points to his analysis. First, the dollar isn’t that weak. It’s had a sharp fall, but it remains close to its average for the last five years (and if we take inflation into account, it’s still almost as strong as in 1985, when central banks felt it necessary to coordinate to weaken it):

Further, US exceptionalism was due a correction. This is how MSCI’s index for the US has performed compared to the rest of the world since 1990:

Terminal users might press the button to open this chart in G, so you can view it on a log scale. Even then, the length of US dominance and the brutal way it’s been interrupted stands out. To view this data another way, this is how much the US/Rest of the World ratio has varied from its own 200-day moving average over this time. It’s now at the biggest downward departure from the long-term trend in 16 years:

It’s the persistence of US outperformance since the Global Financial Crisis that stands out as unusual, more than the current interruption. But this does look like a massive bout of underperformance by standards that go back decades. By Parker’s reckoning, since World War II only the 1972-74 and 1976-78 stagflation episodes and the 1987 crash have been worse. So it’s reasonable to doubt that it will go on much longer.

In part, the US stock market has been so exceptional because money has been flowing in from investors using it as a piggy bank. But there’s also a fundamental reason: US companies are more profitable. Here is how operating profit margins compare for the S&P 500 and the Stoxx Europe 600:

According to Parker, if tariffs were to cause profit margins to shrink back to 2018 levels, “that could cause enough multiple contraction for the US market to continue to underperform.” That’s not a given. It’s certainly possible, but it would be remarkable if the administration were to persist with the a policy doing that much damage.

It’s also not an issue that can be resolved quickly. In the last quarter, tariffs caused many purchases to be brought forward, so this earnings season won’t be a good guide to their eventual impact. To a greater extent than usual, how CEOs predict the future matters more. The defense groups RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Northrop Grumman both announced results better than expected Tuesday, but briefed that they expected tariffs to affect their profits. This is what happened next:

(Incidentally, the way the US arms manufacturers have counterintuitively lagged their European counterparts since the invasion of Ukraine is stupefying):

Another reason for optimism, Parker points out, is the US concentration in companies well positioned to benefit from the growth trends of the next decade, such as artificial intelligence, the power technologies to fuel it, and life sciences.

One final concern is the way that this selloff has happened. Away from the stock market, there’s been a rare combination of rising bond yields and a falling dollar. As higher yields generally attract money into a currency, that’s a bad sign that confidence is dwindling, and it can signal trouble for equities. For a potent example, one reader pointed that the great Black Monday crash of 1987 was preceded by just that combination:

If the divergence persists much further, it will provide more evidence that investors really do require a bigger risk premium to invest in Treasuries. But overall, Parker’s arguments are well taken. There’s good reason to fear that the policy missteps of the last few months have ended US exceptionalism, but it’s way too soon to be sure.


In a masterpiece of parliamentary disdain, a minister under pressure to resign once heard this statement from the Westminster back benches: “I have nothing against his wife and children, but I think he should spend more time with them.” Similarly, investors don’t have anything against Tesla’s workers and executives, but they think that Elon Musk should spend more time with them.

It’s hard to find any other explanation for Tuesday, when Tesla Inc. announced objectively awful results after the market closed — bad in absolute terms and worse than expectations — and its stock exploded upward 90 minutes later when CEO Musk told the earnings call that he’ll return to spend most of his time at the company next month:

Liam Denning has taken a typically ruthless scalpel to the results. The company isn’t even prepared to say it will return to growth this year. Musk’s big message on the call was to ignore electric vehicles (which already exist), and instead focus on robots and robotaxis (which don’t, at least in a form that can safely be sold to the public). Musk’s return is also not full time, as he said he expects to spend a day or so per week at DOGE for the rest of Trump’s term. And he still sounded to me (and Liam) as though he was far more preoccupied with the government than with the great company he runs.

Despite the share price reaction, analysts’ immediate views were negative. The market response shows that a lot of very bad news was in the price, and that the CEO’s loss of interest for the last quarter was a real problem. If in five years we’re taking robotaxis and being waited on by robots, Musk will get the last laugh. He may find that getting there is a full-time job.


Today's Chart of the Day was shared by JC Parets (@JC_ParetsX).


  • It's only Tuesday, but Bitcoin is on pace for its best week since November, bouncing +7.5% over the past two days.
  • JC points out that it reached a six-week high today and reclaimed $90k. At its current price of $91k, Bitcoin has recovered about half of its -30% drawdown.
  • Since the election, $90k has been a key battleground. If this breakout sticks, Crypto winter may finally be over. Bulls want to see $100k next, but the ultimate test will be all-time highs at $110k.
The Takeaway: Bitcoin reclaimed a key inflection point at $90k today. If the breakout sticks, the next upside target will be all-time highs at $110k.



jog on
duc
 
Actual business activity — sales, employment, and so on — is holding up just fine for now. But a profound worry about the future has settled in among America's corporate leaders, making them reluctant to invest or hire.
The big picture: That picture of corporate paralysis comes through in the latest Beige Book, in which Fed officials try to discern what's happening beneath the surface of the U.S. economy by calling up businesspeople and asking them.
  • It points to a risk that, even if March and April data suggest economic stability — and it has so far — corporate behavior is shifting in ways creating high odds of a downturn later in the year.
  • At turning points in the economy, anecdotal compilations like the Fed's eight-times-a-year Beige Book can be good guides to how things are changing in ways that haven't yet shown up in the data.
State of play: The report's top-line summaries of current conditions sound perfectly fine. "Economic activity was little changed since the previous report," it says. "Employment was little changed to up slightly" in most of the country.
  • It's one layer down that the signs of trouble emerge. When it comes to future planning, the trade war is creating profound uncertainty that looks to already be translating into restrained hiring and capital spending.
  • Contacts in several Fed districts "reported that firms were taking a wait-and-see approach to employment, pausing or slowing hiring until there is more clarity on economic conditions," the report said, along with "scattered reports of firms preparing for layoffs."
  • "Business leaders indicated recent strategy discussions shifted away from capital investments aimed at innovation and efficiency toward a focus almost entirely on mitigating tariff-related risks," reported the Kansas City Fed.
By the numbers: The document used the word "uncertainty" 80 times, up from 45 times in the early March edition and 11 times a year ago.
  • In the edition released in April 2020 — the early days of the pandemic — the word appeared only 19 times. In October of 2008, during the free fall phase of the global financial crisis, 16 times.
  • In other words, by this (admittedly imperfect) measure, businesspeople are more unsure of what lies ahead than they were even in some of the most traumatic moments in modern economic history.
Of note: There are many mentions of trouble in the tourism business. The Boston Fed, for example, reported that "travel from Canada declined noticeably, and contacts feared that summer travel from Europe and China could suffer as well because of negative reactions to U.S. tariff policies."



Earnings for 29 April:



I have a position in KO. This has been a bit of a problematic trade.


How US spends $1



The discussion around how the U.S. government spends money is clouded by the jargon of budget nerds, like "discretionary" versus "mandatory" spending. But what would it look like if you converted spending data into plain language?

The big picture: That's what centrist think tank Third Way has done, taking the thousands of lines of federal spending data and categorizing them using plain language.

  • It shows that most of what the government spends money on boils down to payments directly to Americans (Social Security, most prominently), directly paying medical bills or helping people buy health insurance.
By the numbers: In Third Way's analysis, 31 cents of each dollar the government spends consists of checks to Americans.

  • Some 14 cents went to help people buy health insurance or manage their benefits and 12 cents toward medical bill payments.
  • Another 13 cents went to interest on the national debt. Spending on wages for the military and federal law enforcement is a small sliver, a combined 3 cents.
  • Meanwhile, everything else the government does adds up to 26 cents.
What they're saying: "Most people think there's tons of waste in the budget, but that's often because the spending feels like a black box," Zach Moller, director of Third Way's economic program, tells Axios.

  • "Once you see that 60% of every dollar is spent on health care or direct payments, it flips a switch in how you think about what government does."





Global markets have enjoyed something of a relief rally, as we now reach three weeks since Donald Trump launched his Liberation Day tariffs on an unsuspecting world. It seems to be about two things: The news that Trump has no intention of firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and that he intends to be “very nice” to China on trade.

There is much to debate over exactly how much the president conceded, but the key point as far as Mr. Market is concerned is that he’s shown that there is indeed a “Trump Put” — an option that allows investors to limit their losses if shares fall. The strike price is lower than had been hoped, but the key is that Trump has shown that when challenged, he blinks.

If that seems unfair, the circumstantial evidence from the performance of the S&P 500 since Liberation Day looks damning. The gentleman, it seems, is for turning:


Actions matter more than words, so this is a big deal. However, the underlying behavior of markets suggests that this wasn’t much of a relief rally. Since Liberation Day, the only sector of the S&P 500 that has actually risen is consumer staples, the traditional destination for the nervous. The performance of staples relative to consumer discretionary companies, and of stocks relative to bonds, confirms ongoing savage negativity following the optimism of the post-election Trump Bump:


And there’s one particular harbinger of concern. Walmart Inc. was the only stock in the S&P 500 that rose between the market peak in 2007 and the low in 2009. When it is beating the overall market, it’s a clear sign that investors don’t think much of the economy. And Walmart is doing well of late, hitting an all-time relative to the market:


So the market is reassured that it seems to have the power to pull the president back from the brink of making a major mistake. That’s important, but it doesn’t mean everything is great. Particularly, the retreat from US stocks to other markets is ongoing. The turnaround this year to date is spectacular:


Despite the relief at signs that they can bully the president, investors are still plainly unhappy, and the direction of travel for the market from here is not clear. That’s in large part because the U-turns could be more complete.

Trump wants tariffs on China to be “substantially lower,” but not negative, while Scott Bessent then assured everyone that the cuts won’t be unilateral. In other words, the administration wants to make a deal to reduce tariffs from their current absurd level, which we knew already. The shift in rhetorical tone is important; far more precision is needed before we can lift the uncertainty.

That’s problematic because uncertainty in itself inhibits economic activity and money-making. The Federal Reserve’s regular Beige Book, a collation of anecdotes and observations from the different branches’ contacts with business, illustrates the problem neatly. The latest, published Wednesday, is dominated by the uncertainty created by tariffs. Oxford Economics keeps this handy breakdown of the themes that dominate each edition. It speaks for itself:


Source: Oxford Economics
While tariff uncertainty persists, the risk is that it will so inhibit businesses as to drive the economy into an unnecessary recession. Once that possibility can be ruled out, then a consistent market advance could happen.

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Investors would rather have better defenses. Trump looks as though he is movable, but you wouldn’t want to bet that any given level in the market will turn him around. And nothing else works. To quote Viktor Shvets of Macquarie:
Capital markets are proving to be the only guardrail with sufficient power to defang the most extreme outcomes. Neither legislature, corporates nor judiciary seem able to restrain the surging executive power that recognizes few checks and balances.
Click to expand...
He added that while the selloffs had forced the president to dial back the rhetoric, his most recent words run counter to his lofty long-term aims of remaking American society and the economy by changing the world. With decision-making evidently erratic, Shvets predicts “rolling chaos over years to come.”

If you can’t rely on a Trump Put with a fixed strike price, then predicting a change in policy requires knowledge of, first, the Kremlinology of who has the president’s ear at any one time (should we listen to Bessent? Navarro? who?), and, second, the state of the president’s mind.

Investors know virtually nothing about either. That shrouds future moves with uncertainty and effectively forces them to show more caution, or in more technical terms to demand greater risk premia and therefore lower prices. As Hubert de Barochez of Capital Economics puts it, with some diplomacy:
The fact that the rally was sparked largely by conciliatory remarks from US President Trump – whose rhetoric is notoriously volatile – raises questions about its durability.
Click to expand...
A firmer guardrail involves the electorate, not the market. Bankim Chadha of Deutsche Bank AG has reduced his target for the S&P 500 for the year, citing doubts over whether tariff policies will be abandoned before they have already driven the economy into a recession. The latest market-driven U-turns don’t guarantee a positive outcome, but there is hope the president’s approval numbers suggest a clearer turning point ahead:

Chadha’s base case remains “a significant rally on a credible relent on trade policies, with a target of 6,150 by year-end” (a 14% gain from here). But that credible relent would, he thinks, require a much lower approval rating, perhaps in the low 40s or mid-30s. By then, it may be too late: “The risk to our view is we don’t get a relent before the nonlinearities of recession kick in.”

Approval tends to move with consumer confidence which, as Chadha shows, was really bad for Joe Biden. Trump’s rating remains well above Biden’s when he left office, but falling confidence suggests it has further to drop.


Markets see ending the current virtual embargo on China, and the removal of practically all tariffs announced this year on everyone else, as the ultimate put. The risk, still not vanquished, is that it doesn’t come until too late.

Survival Tips​

This section normally goes without a chart, but it’s time for an exception. All journalists live in fear of becoming a contrarian indicator. Most notorious is the “cover curse” when a magazine hypes some trend, and thereby brings it to an end. A BusinessWeek cover proclaiming the “Death of the Equity” shortly before the 1980s bull market is particularly notorious.

It’s normally journalists who impose the cover curse. This time is different, because it’s not just news people anymore, nor is it real magazines. This social media post came from the White House on Feb. 19:

What’s the significance of that date? It was the day the market peaked:

You really, truly couldn’t make it up. The things that go on at market turning points are fascinating. My other favorite is this brilliant, scaldingattack on CNBC and the financial crisis by Jon Stewart in March 2009. It was broadcast a few hours after the market had hit its low. It’s never returned to the level that aroused Stewart’s ire.

For now, a tip to my colleagues at what is now Bloomberg Businessweek. If you want to make a lot of people very happy, run a cover that says something like “Death of the Dollar.”





With gold in another secular bull market, I'll run an extended explanation as to the 'why'.


"A nation's exchange rate is the single most important price in the economy. It will influence the entire range of individual prices,imports,exports and the level of economic activity."

The above quote is from Paul Volcker.

The exchange rate is the price that communicates to the entrepreneur the distinguishing factors in what should be produced at home and that which should be priced abroad.

The luminary that thought really deeply about exchange rates was Jacques Reuff, advisor to de Gaulle and the man that arguably created the mess that the US find themselves in today through breaking Nixon and the US in 1971.

That was shock #1

Shock #2 was the fall of the Berlin Wall, which arguably initiated the second great wave of globalisation which is now ending, which is shock #3.

jog on
duc
 
The Fed doesn’t set the tone — it reacts to it. Always has. Always will.

Waller’s comment this week was clear:

“A serious drop in the job market could prompt more cuts, sooner.”

Translation? The Fed is laying the groundwork. And the bond market already knows it.

Look at the chart. The 2-Year Treasury Yield (blue) has already rolled over. The Effective Federal Funds Rate (brown) just follows behind it, every cycle.
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This is why we watch the 2-year so closely — it’s the market’s real Fed Funds forecast.

Now, with Fed speakers getting more dovish and June cut odds jumping to 58%, the message is simple:

The bond market isn’t asking for cuts. It’s demanding them.

Don’t trade off speeches. Trade off structure. And right now, that structure says easing is coming.

The 2 year always whispers before the Fed finally listens.





The percentage of stocks in the S&P 500, S&P 400, and S&P 600 with their 50-day moving average above their 200-day moving average have declined to levels not seen since the 2022 market downturn.
Here’s the chart:

Let's break down what the chart shows:
  • The black line in the top panel shows the price of the S&P 500 index.
  • The blue line in the bottom panel represents the percentage of S&P 500 stocks with a 50-day moving average greater than their 200-day moving average.
  • The gray line in the bottom panel represents the percentage of S&P 400 stocks with a 50-day moving average greater than their 200-day moving average.
  • The red line in the bottom panel represents the percentage of S&P 600 stocks with a 50-day moving average greater than their 200-day moving average.
The Takeaway: When we look beneath the surface, it's evident that most stocks are in downtrends.
Only 38% of S&P 500 stocks are experiencing uptrends, while just 29% of S&P 400 stocks and a mere 22% of S&P 600 stocks are in uptrends.

The trends of these breadth readings rolled over in December 2023 and have been declining ever since, and have now fallen back to levels not seen since the 2022 bear market.

When the majority of stocks are in downtrends, this is normal behavior when the overall market is in a bear market. This persistent weakness in the market could lead to further downside action if the bulls do not address this issue soon.

Currently, there are no indications that these downtrends are reversing, as the weight of the evidence remains in favor of the bears.
Therefore, it's hard for me to be optimistic about the market at this time.

Is this the right environment for allocating capital, or should we wait for bullish data points that shift the weight of the evidence?
What are your thoughts?



Friday, April 25, 2025
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The Secret Mid-caps. Where to find them?
Mid-caps are the "Jan Brady's" of the world. The forgotten one of the bunch.

People love to talk about the mega-cap stocks and things like the Mag 7.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, they love debating about rotation or lack of rotation into Small-cap stocks.

But what about the ones in the middle? - the Mid-caps!

Traditionally, Mid-caps are between $2B - $10B in market-cap, with Large-caps being categorized by the stocks above $10B and the Small-caps are below $2B.

But we changed the rules around here years ago, when it became quite obvious that we had to.

You have multi-trillion dollar companies now. With market-cap inflation like this, we need to adjust accordingly.

So for us, $4B - $30B makes more sense for the mid-caps.

And not just the American ones, but specifically the ones around the world are being ignored by most investors.

This is where our Jr. International Hall-of-Famers comes in. Foreign stocks, that trade on U.S. exchanges that are mostly in that "mid-cap" category that we created.

Here's the current list categorized by proximity to new 52-week highs:
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Once we organize the data and sort them correctly, we dive in and hand select the best opportunities to put money to work from the long side.

There are a few that stand out in this week's scan.




Elon Musk arrived in Washington as the most powerful political outsider ever, brimming with Silicon Valley swagger and bipartisan buy-in for the goal of streamlining the federal government.
  • He's leaving with his reputation wounded, relationships severed, companies in crisis, fortune diminished — and little to show for it.
Why it matters: The disruption he unleashed inside the federal government — for better or for worse — will reverberate for decades, Axios' Zachary Basu writes.
Zoom in: Musk's favorability ratings have plummeted.
  • Tesla, battered by boycotts, protests and even firebombings, saw its net income plunge 71% in the first quarter.
  • Musk's net worth has declined a staggering $122 billion this year — nearly matching the $160 billion in government savings claimed by DOGE, which budget experts believe is wildly inflated.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, a longtime Tesla bull, celebrated the end of "this dark chapter," but warned: "The brand damage caused by Musk in the White House/DOGE over the past few months will not go away."
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President Trump and Elon Musk attend a UFC fight earlier this month in Miami. Photo: Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald via Getty Images
Musk did take a wrecking ball to many parts of the federal government.
  • DOGE shuttered USAID and has since gone agency by agency, infiltrating sensitive IT networks — including the Treasury Department's centralized payments system — in the name of rooting out "waste, fraud and abuse."
  • But the savings it produced were nowhere near the $2 trillion Musk set as a target.
  • And the DOGE team's credibility has been undermined by mistakes, duplications and false assumptions uploaded — then quietly deleted — on its online "wall of receipts."
The other side: "I can't speak more highly about any individual," President Trump told reporters Wednesday, heaping praise on his billionaire adviser and top donor.
  • "He was treated very unfairly by — I guess you'd call it the public, some of the public," Trump added. "He loves the country. He doesn't need to do this."
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends an Oval Office meeting yesterday between President Trump and Norway's Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Store. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
"I'll hook you up to a f--king polygraph!" Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shouted at the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last month, according to The Wall Street Journal.
  • Hegseth suspected the acting chairman, Christopher Grady, of leaking his plans to give Elon Musk a classified briefing about China.
  • The SecDef's suspicions later turned to other officials, whom he also threatened with a polygraph.
️ Behind the scenes: President Trump has stood by his embattled Defense secretary as controversies have mounted.
  • Hegseth has fired several institutional fixtures, including his office's scheduler and multiple generals. But he has also booted many of the close allies who helped him through the confirmation process and came with him to the Pentagon.
The turmoil has left him without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff or senior adviser, frustrating both Pentagon officials and GOP congressional offices who need to work with his office, per the Journal.
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Data: National Association of Realtors. Chart: Axios Visuals
The housing market is still in a major funk:
  • Sales of existing homes fell by 5.9% in March, which is typically the beginning of the busiest home-buying season.
  • That's the biggest one-month drop since 2022, and a sign that 2025 may be the third straight year of sluggish sales.
Between the lines: Prices are high, interest rates are still at 6.8% and the economic volatility of the past few months has either wiped out some buyers' savings or scared them away from making a big move.
America's status as the top global investment magnet is in doubt.
Why it matters: Companies had been eager to spend billions to stand up factories, warehouses and more on U.S. soil, with confidence that political stability would make such investments worthwhile for decades to come.
  • But President Trump's trade policies have made the economic backdrop more erratic and businesses are hitting pause, with new questions about whether executives can make a multiyear bet on America.
The big picture: It is an unintended consequence of the on-again, off-again tariff policy out of the White House. Multinational corporations are not sure what the world will look like in less than 90 days, when Trump's freeze on reciprocal tariffs expires.
  • There has been assurance that negotiations may lead to de-escalation among major trading partners. But that is no guarantee.
What they're saying: "Overall, a tendency to take big bets — two- to three-year investments, or five- to 10-year investments with a new manufacturing location — all of those are on pause," Aparna Bharadwaj, a global consultant at Boston Consulting Group, tells Axios.
  • "Any business that wants to make those kinds of big investments will need to have certainty behind it," Bharadwaj says.
Between the lines: Trump hoped the tariffs would result in foreign dollars pouring into America, in the form of intentions to build factories and manufacturing sites.
  • While there have been isolated announcements of such investments touted by the White House, there are new questions about the sustainability of the policies that would make the investments worthwhile.
What to watch: This problem goes beyond the current trade environment. Many businesses realize that America's economic cycles are newly aligned with political cycles.
  • Huge legislation like former President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act risks disappearing in the years it takes companies to break ground on the investments made under the law.
"The swing between the blue and the red has become wider," Bharadwaj says. For decades, "it was a slight switch to the left, or slight switch to the right, but business could continue as usual."
The intrigue: The questions about capital expenditures are mirrored in financial markets, where foreigners are questioning the status of the U.S. as a safe haven.
  • The shakier domestic growth outlook implies a declining dollar and global investors' desire to rebalance their portfolios to be less concentrated in the U.S., Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius told reporters this morning.
  • "I'm talking about just an environment in which growth is significantly weaker for a period of time, inflation is higher, and the shine comes off of the American exceptionalism trade," Hatzius said.



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The great boxer Mike Tyson and once said that everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face. Similarly, the Trump administration had one for rebuilding the world economy with tariffs. It’s been a rough first round.

The plan was Stephen Miran’s A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System, which must have been the most-viewed document by the financial world over the last six months. Stunningly ambitious, it helped earn its author a gig as chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, birthed the concept of the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” and was widely taken as the road map for Trump 2.0’s bid to reshape the world using tariffs.

Approaching the administration’s 100-day mark next Tuesday, the “User’s Guide” reads differently now. Some of it has come to pass, Trump has deviated sharply from important recommendations, and certain assumptions now look tenuous at best. To help navigate where the global trading system is heading, it’s a good time to pull over and return to the map.
European Rearmament
This is coming to pass — with the key difference that the administration needed only to threaten tariffs, as this was combined with outright hostility to Ukraine and western Europe and an intent to annex Greenland. If Europe has already decided that it cannot rely on US protection, as seems likely, then that makes life much easier for the US — but also that the hope to use the defense umbrella as an inducement is unlikely to work. Instead, allies are responding to the notion that commitments once freely given must now be paid for by seeking new allies.

There’s a Risk That Long Yields Could Rise
Miran expected the currency to rise to offset the imposition of tariffs — which he argued would have the effect of putting the burden on to the tariffed country. But he acknowledged that it might not, and that if the dollar were to weaken, then continuing inflation worries and the high budget deficit would put pressure on Treasuries. That has happened so far. The good news is that inflation numbers have improved in the last few months, but they don’t yet take account of tariffs.
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Proceed Gradually
Miran’s precise suggestion was to raise tariffs by 2% each month until an agreement was reached. That would have worked very much better than the chosen strategy of hiking the tariff on China to 145% in very short order. The exasperating twists and turns of the last three months mean that any forward guidance cannot be credible.

That has had a massive effect on uncertainty, even for the administration’s natural constituency of small business owners. The National Federation of Independent Business has been polling on this for decades, and its members have never before felt so uncertain — but it’s important that their overall optimism still seems relatively healthy:

It’s not yet clear how damaging this will be, but the administration has taken a big risk by acting in such an unpredictable way.
Don’t Upset the Markets
The White House is doing its best to look as unbothered by market selloff as it can. Reversals on the Fed and on “reciprocal” tariffs show that there is indeed a “Trump Put,” but the level to which the market must fall before it’s activated is much lower than many had assumed.

Questionable:​

Tariffs Aren’t Inflationary
Tariffs provide revenue, and if offset by currency adjustments, present minimal inflationary or otherwise adverse side effects, consistent with the experience in 2018-2019.
Click to expand...
This looks increasingly like over-learning the lesson from the very different environment of the brief 2018 trade war. That time, as Miran said, the tariffs were imposed gradually and with due warning, against a backdrop of placid inflationary pressure. They’re much higher now, and there is anxiety among the population about another pickup in prices.
Demand for Treasuries Is Eternal
Demand may not be as inelastic as all that. The week after Liberation Day saw a combined run on both the dollar and Treasuries, which drove the 10-year yield up by the most in a week in more than 20 years. It’s a sign that foreigners have suddenly become much more discerning in their demand for US debt. That said, apart from one shocking week, the Treasury trend is still unclear:

Foreigners Will Pay for the Privilege of Lending to the US
This assertion is beginning to look very questionable. Effectively, the suggestion is that the US should charge foreigners a fee for the privilege of lending to Uncle Sam. Just this month has seen sharply increased interest in alternatives, such as German bunds, Swiss francs, gold, and even Bitcoin. If the US tries to charge a fee like this, the likelihood is that it will just stop the flow of funds into the US — and make it that much harder to fund the deficit.

The US Can Beat China in a Game of Chicken
The game is still going on, but it looks at present like this is flat wrong. China retaliated swiftly, and amped up the pressure with extra measures such as blocking exports of rare earths. Trump’s rhetoric is already swerving away from the confrontation, saying he wants to be “nice” to China with a deal that lowers tariffs. The Chinese response is that tariffs have to come down first before talks can begin.
It’s true that the US buys a lot from others. But this game will be won by the player who can absorb the most pain. That appears to be China, even though it also stands to lose more. This looks like it was a critical bad assumption, and the error has been magnified by the ham-fisted way in which tariffs were imposed.

What Lies Ahead​

So where does this leave us? A hundred days in, Miran’s “User’s Guide” shows that the administration entered the conflict with an inflated view of its own strength, and that it has been handled more abruptly and aggressively than the architects of the policy wanted. The response so far has not been what was bargained for.
Maybe it’s time for a revised edition. Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg

All of that said, the White House wanted a weaker dollar and has got it. Interest rates haven’t broken above their recent ranges, while lower oil prices very much help its agenda. Equities remain buoyed by good earnings results (most recently from Google-owner Alphabet Inc., which enjoyed a 6% bump in after-hours trading after beating expectations for profits and revenues).

A Mar-a-Lago Accord of the kind envisaged in the “User’s Guide,” in which foreigners buy 100-year zero-coupon bonds from the US in return for staying under its security umbrella, now looks unachievable. If such a deal can be made by anyone, it needs to be negotiated with far more finesse than witnessed so far, and the counterparties need to be given good reason to believe that they can trust Washington.

For the future, enough remains unclear that it would be unwise to make assumptions about where the dollar and Treasury yield go from here. We’re not keeping to the course laid out by Miran, but that doesn’t mean that we are irrevocably on the road to de-dollarization.




Oil News:


Friday, April 25th, 2025

The oil markets have seemingly tired of trying to anticipate the next move of US President Donald Trump, with ICE Brent settling within a relatively narrow bandwidth of $66.0-67.5 per barrel this week. Such rangebound trading still represents a fall from a week ago, with hopes of potential US-China trade talks quashed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry denying that any bilateral negotiations were taking place.

Trump Signs Deep Sea Mining Order. Bypassing a recently launched United Nations-brokered pilot called the International Seabed Authority, US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that fast-tracks permitting procedures for deep-sea mining in international waters.

Saudi Arabia Gets Serious About India. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Saudi Arabia with an official visit and accompanied by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman signed a framework agreement to jointly establish two new refineries in India, presumably involving Saudi Aramco.

US Targets Southeast Asia’s Solar Exports. The US Department of Commerce has proposed duties on photovoltaic solar cells produced in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, ranging from 40% on Jinko Solar exports from Malaysia to a whopping 3500% for certain Chinese producers in Cambodia.

EU Wants to Legally Ban Russian Deals. The European Commission is investigatingwhether it would be possible to legislate a continent-wide ban to sign new contracts for Russian fossil fuels, primarily geared to block EU buyers from spot purchases of Russian LNG, still 15% of the continent’s gas needs.

Kazakhstan Shows Its Feisty Side. Currently wielding the worst compliance readings within OPEC+, Kazakh government officials struck back against criticism by stating that Kazakhstan will prioritize national interests over those of OPEC+ as it currently produces some 350,000 b/d above its quota.

Japan Moves to Subsidize Fuel Even More. Japan has announced a revamp of its fuel subsidy policy, providing fixed subsidies from May 22 onwards that seek to lower gasoline and diesel prices by ¥10 per litre ($0.26 per gallon), whilst prices of jet fuel and fuel oil would be cut by half that amount.

China Rejects Indonesia’s New Coal Pricing. Chinese buyers of Indonesian coal continue to boycott Indonesia’s recently launched government-set price for thermal coal, stating that the new HBA pricing benchmark is more costly without any quality improvements and gets updated less frequently.

Tight Asian Stocks Push Copper Higher. Copper producers across China are scrambling to lay their hands on available scrap metal, raising the probability of a short squeeze on copper as buying tilts towards refined copper with total SHFE stocks falling 36% over the past month, seasonally a weak period.

US Senate Mulls Reversal of California Car Sales Mandate. The US House of Representatives is set to vote next week on a measure to derail California’s mandate that all car sales by 2035 be electric, plug-in hybrid or hydrogen, concurrently voting on easing the limits for nitrogen oxide emissions from trucks.

Venezuela Pins Its Hopes on China. Venezuela’s vice president Delcy Rodriguez visited China this week as Caracas seeks to garner the interest of Chinese refiners for prospective crude supplies, with March already showing a month-over-month doubling of China-bound flows ahead of a US sanctions snapback.

Mexico’s Valero Ban Didn’t Last Long. It took less than a month for Mexico’s tax authorities to reinstate the fuel import license of US refiner Valero Energy (NYSE:VLO), its largest gasoline supplier, as a nationwide crackdown on fuel smuggling also led to Pemex buying 9 spot gasoline cargoes in Asia.

US Oil Still Sees a Future in Namibia. Undeterred by the failure of its first exploration well in Namibia (Kapana-1), US oil major Chevron (NYSE:CVX) stated that it is looking to drill a second exploration well in the Walvis Basin in 2026 or 2027, trying its luck closer to the Namibian shore.

India Opens Up Nuclear Investment. The Indian government is set to ease investment requirements into its booming nuclear sector, allowing foreign companies to take stakes of up to 49% in its nuclear plants as New Delhi seeks to expand its capacity 12-fold to 100 GW by 2047.

Iran Seeks Russian Energy Investments. Visiting Moscow this week, Iran’s oil minister Mohsen Paknejad announced that Russian oil companies will invest $4 billionto develop seven Iranian oil fields, concurrently signing a memorandum on the construction of a new nuclear power plant in the country.







Duc's thoughts:

Money:

1. Means of exchange;
2. Unit of account;
3. Store of value.

Reserve Currency:

1. Military dominance;
2. Technological dominance;
3.Sound legal system;
4. Financial centre;
5. Control of the sea lanes.

There are essentially two types of empire: (i) land based and (ii) sea power. The last two empires, Britain and US are sea power empires. The rise of China is a land based empire.

jog on
duc
 
From JC;

  • TSLA is up more than 100% for us.
  • I talk to a lot of people. I see what's happening. I share it all with you.
  • Bitcoin to the moon?
The Tesla (TSLA) options trade we put on this week doubled in less than 10 hours of trading.

We're long the common stock too; it's up 14% since we bought it.

Our TSLA trades are only crypto-related – this is a "sentiment squeeze," first and foremost.

But Tesla does own more than $1 billion in Bitcoin (BTC).

And Elon Musk has not been shy about his feelings for cryptocurrency.

That's something Elon and I share in common: We believe in Bitcoin and crypto for the long term.

We're thrilled we were able to take half off the table yesterday on our 100% winner in TSLA options.

But the upside for Bitcoin and crypto from here looks like the moon to me.

That's why we opened another long position this week.

And we look forward to sharing complete details about our trades as soon as possible...

It's Only Getting Bigger​


I was on the phone Friday afternoon with the founder and CEO of a company that makes crypto mining equipment.

He's pretty excited about this long-term trend:



Did you know it's possible to heat a pool with the excess heat from crypto mining?

I know this because I'm using my Bitcoin mining unit to heat my pool. It's being installed as we speak.

I'm fascinated by the infrastructure – the picks and axes, if you will, and, yes, the pool-heaters...

I'm a private investor in several crypto infrastructure companies. And I'm an investor in multiple crypto-related hedge funds.

I bought another CryptoPunk last month.

This is the "blue-chip" non-fungible token (NFT) collection on the Ethereum blockchain.

Coming into this cycle I only owned one. I bought it years ago. Now I have a second NFT I can trade.

I already have a seven-figure crypto portfolio.

And then we added new crypto-related long positions in the stock market to go with the positions we opened last week.

I think BTC and crypto are here to stay. I think they only get bigger and more interconnected with our everyday lives.

I'm already basically all in. And yet I'm adding exposure.

Here's the thing...

Our new crypto-related trades have no impact on the decision-making for our existing trades.

I look at them in a vacuum – they are their own separate prices. We have strategies for each of our positions, based on risk and reward at the time we open them.

I don't ignore potential crypto-related equity trades because "I'm already long."

I also don't go out of my way to add crypto-related equity trades because I'm already long.

I go into it with a neutral bias. "Just trade what's in front of you," is how I learned it.

That's what we're doing here. It's working. I expect it will continue to keep working.

The Bitcoin and crypto opportunities will continue to expand.

And we'll keep sharing them with you.

Are you with me?

This Week in Everybody's Wrong​


On Monday, we observed that the company formerly known as Microstrategy (MSTR) is above its prior-cycle highs in new all-time high territory.

And we showed you how rabbit mating rituals help us define risk.

Here's why we're looking to get long MSTR.

On Tuesday, we corrected some misperceptions about volatility and the "fear index."

We broke it down to one principle – divide the VIX by 16 to get an estimate of a daily market move – and two general rules.

Here's why we want to sell high volatility and buy low volatility.

On Wednesday, we saw that Bitcoin (BTC) is acting more like Gold and less like the Nasdaq-100.

At the same time, the U.S. Dollar continues to break down.

Here's why the world's No. 1 cryptocurrency is breaking away.

On Thursday, we took it all the way back to Technical Analysis Kindergarten.

Former resistance is turning into support – just like they draw it up – and polarity is in play.

Here's why I refuse to fight Papa Dow.

On Friday, we talked about how Amazon (AMZN) is the biggest Consumer Discretionary stock in the U.S.

We're watching AMZN 190 because of what the stock and the sector mean for the market.

Here's why AMZN might be the most important stock in the world.

Have a great weekend.


  • Two bullish breadth signals triggered this week - the notorious Zweig Breadth Thrust and the lesser-known Triple 70 Thrust.

  • These signals have historically led to strong returns, but Grant points out that durable bottoms often feature three or more thrust signals.

  • The Breadth Thrust Composite in the lower pane tracks eight distinct thrust signals. As of Thursday, only two have triggered. According to Grant’s data, the following thrusts remain inactive:
    • 10-Day MA Thrust
    • 20-Day High Thrust
    • NYSE Up Volume Thrust
    • Bottom Spotting Thrust
    • Whaley Thrust
The Takeaway: Two breadth thrusts triggered this week, but bulls should see more thrusts in the coming days if this is a durable bottom.


Sat, Apr 26, 2025

April has been one of the most volatile months in market history, and as we head into the final days of the month next week, equities have returned almost to where they were in late March. Whether the market can build up enough momentum to break above resistance just under 5,500 remains to be seen, but so far it's been quite a round trip over the last month or so.



Just like equities, the US Treasury market has been volatile. Despite all the concerns of a mass exodus out of the Treasury market, the 10-year yield is also around the same levels it traded at in late March.



While stocks and bonds have made a lot of noise with little to show for it, the dollar has maintained its downhill path. After peaking in early January, the US Dollar Index lost about 5% through late March, and Liberation Day only accelerated the slide. Since late March, we've seen an additional decline of nearly 5%, taking the Dollar Index to 52-week lows.

The dollar's slide plays right into the hands of what the Administration seems to want. Stephen Miran, the Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has actively advocated for a weaker dollar to reduce the trade deficit and make US exports more competitive. In his 41-page essay "A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System", Miran outlines his thesis about how to address the economic imbalances resulting from the dollar's overvaluation due to its role as the world's reserve currency. Miran endorses the idea of tariffs as one useful tool of several to help re-engineer global trade. The key to success, though, would hinge on execution as Miran concludes with the observation: "There is a path by which the Trump Administration can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America’s benefit, but it is narrow, and will require careful planning, precise execution, and attention to steps to minimize adverse consequences." Maybe the sequence of events since Liberation Day was part of some orchestrated plan, but there has seemingly been nothing 'careful' or 'precise' about any of it.






The general consensus on the internets is that the bear is over and the resumption of the bull is on.


All manner of technical signs, signals are offered up as evidence.

This is the one that gives me 'some' confidence in the short term (posted a couple of days ago)




1. There have only been 7 sightings in the last 62 years.
2. Each one has signalled the bottom (pretty impressive) except for 2008, which was on a slight lag.

Fundamentally:




China is also feeling the pain and may therefore be more amenable to a deal.




But Bessent seems to be showing a lot of his cards to the Chinese, who probably are showing far less of theirs.


However, it looks like Trump has triggered a US recession. If he has and this picks up momentum, the bear is far from over. A US recession will blow deficits out of control and the UST market is already a shambles.





Thing with recessions, once they start, they are very hard (impossible) to cancel. They just pick up steam and work themselves out over time.




So the questions are:

1. How much inventory is held; and
2. How long will that last; and
3. If businesses close, will they (ever) re-open?

Bessent has indicated, contrary to Trump, that 'a deal' may take 2 to 3 years.

All China has to do to win this war is sit and do nothing for 4 months. The US will be on its knees.

Do I think that the bear is over?

No.

But I do respect (fear) the viciousness of bear market rallies. Next week looks to be a continuation of last week's bounce.


Observations 3

"Inflation consists of subsidising expenditure that gives no returns with money that does not exist."

Jacques Rueff.

The US is the epitome of inflation. Which will only get worse. Social Security, Interest on the debt, bank bailouts, etc.

jog on
duc
 
ducati916 said:
The US is the epitome of inflation. Which will only get worse. Social Security, Interest on the debt, bank bailouts, etc.
Click to expand...
another twist is probably , the reduction in Chinese trade surplus is liable to reduce Chinese ( corporate ) buying of new US debt ( aka roll-overs ) now personally i would be taking those USD and converting them into gold/silver ( and any other metals China considers valuable ) , but China/Chinese make their own decisions

an extra twist will be how many US banks move to become fully Basel III compliant ( and not just pass those hysterical 'stress tests ' )

so watch M2 money supply is will either slow dramatically or go into a super-spin acceleration

also WATCH Buffet , he ( last i heard ) still has a third of a trillion dollars to help worthy companies ( but smack the short term Treasuries , when he starts investing )
ducati916 said:
All China has to do to win this war is sit and do nothing for 4 months. The US will be on its knees.
Click to expand...
but is it in China's interests to do so ?

is Trump better for them than Biden ( unless you think China already owns Newsom )

i still can't get a good read on Xi , and i don't believe he is playing any sort of conventional style of chess ( 2D, 3D , 4D or whatever ) or checkers , but China DOES have a strategy to navigate through this ( possibly without a civil war/regime change )

China might rather it was the EU entirely desperate
 

1. The Chinese asked the US to not pursue QE in 2008. That obviously did not happen. China cut and then eliminated UST buying in 2008 going forward.

2. They have been doing so.

3. Rising, due to liquidity issues:



4. Buffett sat on his hands a long time in the 1970's. Closed up his fund in 1969. Only started buying again in '73,'74

5. Yes.

6. I doubt that they care.

7. Xi seeks to restore China to its pre-1900 parity with the West. He seeks history.

8. The EU is in worse shape than the US.


When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow:



China shut down their economy for 18mths and survived.

The US Bond market lasted 4 days before imploding requiring another bailout last week.

As Trump is wont to say: 'It's a no brainer', China will win.

The error that the US made was to enter the fray with their debt situation unresolved. They needed to restructure the debt first. That requires the Federal Reserve to run YCC.

The debt must be negative real rates. Let inflation do its thing, a la 1949 to 1969.




We are at the 4'th Turning.

Essentially, a new energy/production miracle is required. AI could be it but there are issues. Too much too soon creates unemployment. High unemployment in a high debt system creates (uncontrolled) deflation. That is a 1930's outcome.

While inflation is the desired outcome and only real solution, a bad misstep puts us into a deflationary spiral.

Do you think your politicians have a clue?


jog on
duc
 
ducati916 said:
The error that the US made was to enter the fray with their debt situation unresolved. They needed to restructure the debt first. That requires the Federal Reserve to run YCC.
Click to expand...
as i see it the US needs to put plenty of effort into upgrading internal infrastructure ( road , rail , bridges ,power grids and water supply ) or they risk similar issues to Vietnam currently , ( assuming the US moves towards a LOT more of automated labor , and reduce labor costs impacts

would the US start to issue 'infrastructure bonds ' ( something similar the EU 'green bonds ' ) and delay a possible default on those bonds ... say make them 40 year maturity and fixed interest rates .

but yes the US has several problems not being remedied first
 
I believe the Trump team is aware, the
rest of the west is in TDS
 
From JC;

  • The squeeze has never been more on than it is right now.
  • I have exclusive data going back decades…
  • We’re buying more stocks this week.
An indicator I’ve helped make famous is sending another strong signal.

The epic squeeze that started last week – including the worst-performing sector, large-cap tech, rising 8%?

It’s likely to take stock prices much higher from here.

How do I know?

I’ve got an exclusive set of data…

My Magazine Covers​


Take a look at this series of magazine covers from The Economist. These are all from April…



The Economist is already counting down the days until President Trump’s term ends. They’re talking about a “dollar crisis” that started in December.

It’s all “chaos” and “ruination” to them. Like the United States of America is just going to up and disappear…

And all this pessimism tells me the epic squeeze that started this month is likely to take stock prices much higher from here.

We have a recent example of the exact opposite phenomenon.

Let’s take it all the way back to the fourth quarter of last year.

Six months ago – in October 2024 – the brilliant folks at The Economist were talking about the U.S. and its economy as the “Envy of the World”...



You know what happened during the first quarter…

The U.S. Dollar got destroyed. U.S. stocks underperformed the rest of the world by one of the widest margins in American history.

And we were all over it. We sounded the alarm about a U.S. Dollar collapse in December.

We pounded the table about why you should buy Chinese stocks.

We highlighted other assets likely to benefit from a falling U.S. Dollar and an underperforming American stock market.

The setup right now is about more than just The Economist and its magazine covers, though.

We’re seeing extremes across the board in our sentiment indicators.

Take the most recent survey from the Conference Board, which found that almost half of consumers expect stock prices to fall.

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index just hit its fourth-lowest level on record. This data goes back to the 1950s.

Consumer expectations fell to 47.3 in April from 52.6 in March and are down 32% since January.

This is the steepest three-month percentage decline seen since the 1990 recession.

When the journalists and the surveys are all this sad…

As a trader and an investor, it makes me really, really happy.

Why Things Are Already Bullish​


I get a lot of credit for the “Magazine Cover Indicator” these days.

The curriculum for the Chartered Market Technician designation course includes some of my work in the section on it.

That’s probably because I have one of the greatest collections of contrarian magazine covers of anyone I know of.

BusinessWeek… Forbes… Fortune… Time… The New Yorker… The Economist… so many issues of The Economist…

But, I promise you, investors and traders have been analyzing magazine covers since well before I was even born.

So, what is the “Magazine Cover Indicator”?

More importantly, what is it telling us about how to profit in the stock market today?

Journalists are great at a lot of things.

Where they bring the most value is by aggregating consumer sentiment.

They do a decent job aggregating investor and trader sentiment, too.

But think about it like this.

First, a journalist (who is probably not educated or trained to analyze or understand financial markets) has to figure out what everybody is thinking.

They have to write an article and submit it for editing and proofing.

There’s also art and design to consider. Then the creative team has to get approval from the publishers.

By the time the magazine cover is ready to sit on shelves at airport bookstores, weeks – even months – have passed.

And it’s probably too late…

In fact, I know it’s too late.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be of value to us.

Right now, the “Magazine Cover Indicator” is extremely bearish.

But that’s a strongly bullish signal for us.


In the climactic scene in Trading Places — easily the funniest film about commodity trading ever made — Mortimer Duke realizes he has lost his fortune in the day’s trading, and screams, “Turn those machines back on!”, thinking that if trading could only start again, things would go back to normal. Larry McDonald of Bear Traps Report offers this as a market analogy:
Traders behaved last week as though they could hit the usual on-switch, after the spasm that greeted the Trump 2.0 agenda. The rally was potent, aided by confirmation that Jerome Powell wouldn’t be fired as chair of the Federal Reserve, more emollient noises about tariffs on China, and a generally good start to the earnings season. It even triggered the Zweig Breadth Indicator for only the 18th time in 80 years, an almost foolproof bullish signal for the next 12 months; it only happens when when the share of stocks that are rising moves from less than 40% to more than 61.5% within a 10-day period. In other words, this rally lifted a lot of boats, and left many pointing in a positive direction.

The recovery of the VIX index of volatility since the April 9 announcement of a 90-day delay on tariffs has been a sight to behold:

The tariff regime still on the books remains considerably worse than what was regarded as the worst-case scenario a month ago, but nobody trading the market on a short-term basis can afford to ignore signals like this. Risk appetite and liquidity suggest that risk assets can continue to move higher for now. That’s true whatever the long-term destination might be.

Viewed in only a slightly longer context, the S&P 500 is essentially, as the Duke brothers might have wanted, back where it was a year ago. This is true whether you compare it to bonds (proxied by the TLT exchange-traded fund, which tracks Bloomberg’s index of long treasuries), or to other stock markets (proxied by the MSCI All-World excluding US index).

Within the stock market, what had seemed a clear turning point is now murkier. This is how the Magnificent Seven have fared compared to the average stock in the S&P 500 since the turn of the decade:

The toppling of the Magnificents seemed obvious a month ago, but now it’s more ambiguous, as they keep returning to their 200-day moving average relative to the average stock. Their upward trend has been corrected for post-election excess, but it’s not been ended.
Some changes have lasted, starting with expectations of the Fed. The chart shows the number of rate cuts that had been priced in at the turn of the year, on April 8 — the point of maximum angst before Donald Trump delayed tariffs the next day — and currently.
Markets expect the Fed to cut far more aggressively now than they did before Trump took office. That hasn’t changed since the tariff reversal, other than that early emergency cuts seem less likely:

The reason for this: Traders think a recession is far more likely. At present, they expect the Fed to hold off cutting for a while until the inflationary impact of the tariffs is clear, and then slash rates about five times. Such a pattern only makes sense if a slowdown takes hold. Lower rates historically help equity prices, of course, but not when they’re a response to a weak economy. Rightly or wrongly, most investors are working on the assumption that even if tariffs come down significantly, they will still be too heavy to avoid a recession.

Meanwhile, the dollar’s decline hasn’t been arrested. In some ways, this is still not that big a deal. On a broad trade-weighted basis, it remains higher than for much of this decade, and its decline isn’t as strong as the fall after the Covid panic of 2020, nor after US inflation peaked in 2022:

But this ignores the fact that both those declines came as risk appetite returned after fear had driven money into the dollar as a haven. This is different. Fear is rising, and the dollar is still selling off. That implies broken confidence in the US, which has been a dominant narrative for weeks. The idea of American exceptionalism built up in markets over decades, and had grown extreme in the five years since the pandemic. That cannot be priced out in a few weeks, and markets won’t move in a straight line as funds leave the US. Julian Brigden of MI2 Partners argues:
Last week saw a potent “counter-trend correction” as people took an exciting narrative too far and too fast. Whether it comes true depends on where policy moves from now, and the reactions to it. If almost all the announced tariffs are repealed and China and the US thrash out an accommodation, while Washington resumes enthusiastic support for Ukraine and works closely with European allies, then things will begin to look very different. The mood music of the last few days suggests that all of this is just about conceivable. Tax cuts on top — which Trump is sensibly returning to the conversation — would juice things up further.


Judge for yourselves how plausible that scenario is. Trump doesn’t admit errors, so it will be hard to achieve. Meanwhile, the overwhelming sentiment, particularly outside the US but also on Wall Street, is that a Rubicon has been crossed, and trust in the US irretrievably damaged. Arguably, even the the scenario I just mapped out wouldn’t restore it.

Evidently, many still believe the machines can be switched back on. They shouldn’t be ignored, and trading never goes in a straight line — but it would make sense to take last week’s bounce as an opportunity to continue positioning for the gradual decline of American exceptionalism.
​



This is set to be a blockbuster week for economic data. Making sense of it will be even trickier than usual, given trade war-induced crosscurrents.
The big picture: New readings on GDP, employment, and more will shed some light on how the economy has fared heading into spring, but businesses' efforts to get ahead of tariffs — both in their supply chains and hiring decisions — will make for murky data readings.
  • It's not just that the future is uncertain. More so than usual, the present and recent past are uncertain.
Driving the news: Tomorrow, we get data on job openings and hiring for March. Wednesday, the initial release of Q1 GDP is due out, as is the Employment Cost Index (the gold standard for measuring wage inflation) and data on March personal income and consumption.
  • Then, on Friday, comes April data on payrolls and unemployment — the first "hard data" to cover the period after President Trump announced aggressive global tariffs on April 2.
  • All of these carry unusual asterisks due to the overhang of trade policy uncertainty — but with uncertain magnitudes.
State of play: GDP is being affected by businesses importing goods to build a stockpile before tariffs go into effect.
  • In the arithmetic of GDP, imports subtract from growth. But an inventory buildup increases growth. When businesses ramp up imports and build up inventories, those forces should offset and be neutral for GDP growth.
  • But measurement challenges may mess up that relationship, Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius said, as inventories are one of the less-reliable parts of the GDP data.
Zoom out: It's not just businesses that have been looking to get ahead of tariffs; it's consumers, too, which would show up in the consumption expenditures data out Wednesday.
  • But the flip side of Americans pulling forward purchases of cars and other durable goods is a likely weak patch in demand in subsequent months, regardless of what else is happening in the economy.
What they're saying: "One issue in reading the data is pre-buying," Hatzius told reporters Friday. "That's going to make it very difficult to see in hard dollar numbers what is really going on with the economy."
  • "Anecdotally, I'm sure you know people who bought a car because they're worried about tariffs," he said, noting a surge in March auto sales seen in recent retail sales data. "I know several people who bought a car because they were worried about tariffs."
Between the lines: In the labor market, different dynamics apply. There's scant evidence that companies are engaging in large-scale layoffs; weekly data on jobless claims has remained stable. But trade war dynamics and jittery markets may be making companies reluctant to hire.
  • Whether that will be enough to affect April payrolls data, however, is an open question.
  • The reference week for this report covered the time period just after Trump announced his so-called reciprocal tariffs and encompasses the period when he partially backed down.
  • Still, hiring processes don't turn on a dime, so the data out Friday is more likely to reflect companies' longer-term economic outlook.
The bottom line: We're still in the economic calm before the storm. Data out this week should confirm that — but not as reliably as one might hope.






With USD down and falling still, rising prices will hurt the US consumer and small businesses. Inflation coupled with increasing unemployment = stagflation, the bane of the '70's.

This bear is just getting started.

I still think it will look something like the 1969-1980 bear market. Big falls and big rallies, essentially going nowhere while inflation eats away the 'real' returns in nominal dollar terms.





jog on
duc
 
Oil News:

142 executive orders and 100 days into the second presidential mandate of Donald Trump, commodity markets are reeling from disruptive policies launched by the U.S. President.

- The US dollar has shed a lot of strength as its standing vis-à-vis other currencies such as the euro deteriorated (the EU currency gained 10% since late January, with the EUR/USD rate now standing at 1.14).

- Whilst exchange-traded gasoline prices in the US have barely changed compared to where they were three months ago, Trump has been instrumental in lowering global oil prices, down 17% since he took the oath on January 20, a notable jump vs the 7% decline he achieved after the first 100 days of his 2017-2021 term.

- The future of the U.S.-China import tariff war will define energy prices of the upcoming months as the Trump administration’s 145% tariff on China (and the reciprocal 125% from Beijing) is starting to create an oversupply in LNG, LPG, and ethane markets.

Market Movers

- Aster Chemicals, a joint venture of Glencore and Indonesia’s Chandra Asri Group, is reportedly keen to take over ExxonMobil’s (NYSE:XOM) retail business in Singapore, valued at roughly $1 billion.

- Shell (LON:SHEL) agreed to sell its 16.125% interest in Colonial Enterprises to Canada’s investment giant Brookfield Infrastructure Partners for $1.45 billion, operator of the US’s largest gasoline pipeline.

- US natural gas major EQT (NYSE:EQT) announced it would purchase the upstream and midstream assets of Marcellus-focused producer Olympus Energy for $1.8 billion, boosting its output by 500 MMCf/day.

- The world’s leading offshore wind developer, Germany’s RWE (ETR:RWE) has stopped all work on its US projects, citing Trump’s moves against the industry, having paid some $7 billion on its leases in offshore Louisiana and New York.

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Brent prices have dipped below $65 per barrel again as the willingness of Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ countries to unwind even more production into the summer months depresses market sentiment. A potential Russia-Ukraine negotiations breakthrough or a rapprochement between the US and Iran loom large for oil markets, with bullish factors remaining scarce.

BP’s Corporate Strategy Falls Apart. Posting a 48% year-over-year plunge in Q1 net profits to $1.4 billion, UK oil major BP (NYSE:BP) announced its strategy chief, Giulia Chierchia, will be leaving the company on June 01 under pressure from activist investor Elliott Investment.

Power Outages Bring Spain to a Halt. An unprecedented power outage debilitated the economy of Spain this Monday, grinding every single oil refinery in the country to a forced halt, whilst also paralysing traffic and grounding flights, however, the cause still remains unknown.

White House Allows Higher Ethanol Content. The US Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollings, signed an emergency waiver that allows the sale of E15, a higher-ethanol gasoline blend that biofuel producers sought to sell all year round, in a bid to lower summer gasoline prices across the Midwest.

US Targets Houthis’ Oil Deliveries. The White House imposed sanctions on three tankers delivering oil and refined products to Yemen’s Houthis, with the Tulip, Maisan, and White Whale vessels routinely shuttling to the port of Ras Isa, as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on them.

Iraq Revisits Syria Pipeline Plans. Iraq’s top political brass met with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa this week to discuss restoring the Kirkuk-Baniyas oil pipeline, out of operation since 2003 when it was damaged by US airstrikes, seeking to avoid intermediaries in supplying the Syrian market.

Bill Gates Splashes the Cash on Congo Cobalt. KoBold Metals, the mining startup backed by Bill Gates, is preparing to announce huge deals in Africa’s heartland of Congo after a successful raise of $537 million in January, seeking to concurrently tap into the emerging US-DR Congo minerals pact.

Kuwait Gets into a Buying Frenzy. Almost immediately after announcing the $650 million purchase of a 25% stake in Chinese chemicals producer Wanhua Chemical, Kuwait’s national oil company, KPC, is now reportedly in active negotiations over taking a stake in Woodside’s (ASX:WDS) Louisiana LNG.

Beijing Approves New 27 Billion Nuclear Buildout. China’s State Council has approved the construction of 10 new nuclear power reactors at an estimated cost of $27.5 billion, with each unit being an extension of existing plants, as Beijing currently wields 60 GW of nuclear capacity.

Tankers Rush to Load Venezuelan Crude. At least six tankers have been queuing next to Venezuela’s oil ports, including 5 vessels chartered by Chevron and one by trading firm Vitol, as the Latin American country is bracing for the May 27 expiry of the US oil major’s production license.

India Tells Steel Industry to Invest Abroad. Faced with a 60-million-tonne import dependence on coking coal, India’s government has publicly encouraged its steel companies to acquire coking coal and iron ore mining assets abroad, with Indonesia and Australia topping the list of candidates.

Pre-Holiday Buying Lifts Copper Prices. Robust Chinese buying raised LME three-month copper prices to $9,460 per metric tonne as buyers prepare for the May Day holiday in the Asian country, with China stocks remaining low on the back of strong Asia-to-US flows that still keep CME futures at a premium to other regional prices.

China Eyes Lower Soymeal Demand. Seeking to curb reliance on imported agricultural feedstocks, Chinese authorities will be mandating a slash in soymeal use in animal feed to 10% by 2030, expanding production capacity in food waste, insect, and animal-based protein instead.

US Trade Pressure Starts to Bear Fruit. New Delhi is preparing to offer the United States a future-proof guarantee of a most-favored-nation clause in bilateral trade, potentially making India the first large country to sign a trade deal with the Trump administration.



Donald Trump has reached his 100th day in office, the landmark at which all presidents since FDR have been gauged, and the dollar already has a strong verdict. The DXY dollar index, against a basket of other developed market currencies, has given up almost 10%. This is by some way a record in the five decades since Richard Nixon unpegged the dollar from gold in 1971. Trump 2.0 has now become a mirroring outlier for Ronald Reagan’s first 100 days, when the index rose by 10%:

By a curious quirk of fate, Monday was also the centenary of what’s now regarded as possibly history’s greatest currency policy error — Winston Churchill’s decision to return the pound to the gold standard in 1925. That incident laid bare that after a century of dominance, sterling was no longer able to function as the world’s reserve currency.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should regard Trump 2.0 as a signal that dollar hegemony is over, although it lends itself to that probably overdone narrative. As Capital Economics’ Neil Shearing points out, roughly 90% of cross-border transactions are denominated in dollars – which is far more than would be implied by the US share of global GDP or trade. “In effect, the US provides the financial plumbing for the global economy. This gives it enormous influence.”

In another critical difference with Churchill, there is no clear contender waiting in the wings, thanks to the euro’s institutional problems and China’s reluctance to lift capital controls. But it makes ample sense to ask whether this is the beginning of one of the dollar’s long bear cycles — and whether the loss of confidence can be reversed.

Taking inflation into account and comparing against a broad range of other currencies, the dollar has a well-established habit of moving in long cycles. The current one started when confidence in the US economy hit rock bottom in the wake of Standard & Poor’s downgrade of US sovereign debt, and it’s now the longest upward trend since the end of the gold peg. A bear market looks overdue:

If the Liberation Day tariffs have provided the catalyst to take down the dollar, that would make sense; the uncertainty surrounding US trade policy now makes it far less appealing. It’s also prompted several leading houses to lower their forecasts and even to proclaim the beginning of a dollar bear market. This is from Deutsche Bank AG’s George Saravelos:
Deutsche expects the dollar to trend ever closer to the $1.30 level at which it has purchasing power parity with the euro over the remainder of this decade. At present, the euro stands at $1.14.

While stocks, bonds and commodities have all enjoyed significant rebounds since the post-Liberation Day selloff, the dollar hasn’t joined in. That implies that foreigners have been doing much of the selling, while domestic investors must still be buying:

In doing so, however, foreigners are continuing a trend that has been underway for a while. The reserve managers of Japan and China have been reducing their holdings of US Treasuries for years, as this chart from Mansoor Mohi-Uddin, chief economist of the Bank of Singapore, makes clear:

Mohi-Uddin adds that US investors could themselves drive future dollar weakness. “If US managers also start raising their foreign assets in response to this year’s shocks,” he says, “the USD will keep trending lower, too.”

Of late, the dollar’s problem is centered on individual foreign investors, many of whom are affronted by the Trump administration’s tactics. Saravelos shows below that flows into foreign-denominated exchange-traded funds holding US assets have been sharply negative (although in the case of equities this is largely a function of the extreme enthusiasm that followed Trump’s election):


There’s no sign of any recovery among foreigners in the last couple of weeks as the US stock market has rebounded. If the tariff climbdowns have buoyed confidence, it’s been at home, not abroad. EPFR’s data for foreign-domiciled US funds not traded on exchanges shows a broadly similar pattern, although the data do reflect a slight return of demand for equities in recent days:


The selling has mostly come from Europeans. Goldman Sachs’ David Kostin offers this chart showing that they’ve staged a dramatic exit from US equities while other foreign investors have generally held on. These figures incorporate both mutual funds and ETFs:


That can be explained by the confluence of foreign policy and an overpowering need for economic balance. Vice President JD Vance’s speech in Munich was a watershed moment that convinced Germany (and others) that American support could no longer be relied on, and that it was necessary to rearm. Lifting the constitutional brake on borrowing led to a remarkable surge. That’s clearest from indexes of smaller companies most directly exposed to their home economy, the German MDAX and the US Russell 2000. The former has outperformed the latter by 45% since its brief decline following the US election:

For a generation, Germany has been borrowing too little and the US too much. That’s led to a huge accumulation of capital in the US. Rebalancing, as this chart from BCA Research demonstrates, is healthy for all concerned — and there is a lot further to go:


Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has hailed German rebalancing as a positive development. He has a valid point that it might not have happened without the hob-nailed US foreign policy.

If there’s a domestic political lesson from the way the dollar is reacting now compared to Reagan’s 100 days, it’s that change in the US happens within parties, not between them. Southern Democrats instituted segregation, and it took a Southern Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, to do away with it. Reagan ushered in a model of assertive free markets, globalization and foreign policy, which added up to a strong dollar. Now, another Republican is championing intervention in the economy, aggressive protectionism and isolationism.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both brilliant Democratic politicians, might have had the chance to undo Reaganism, but didn’t. Instead, the job has fallen to a Republican. And it’s obvious what the foreign exchange market thinks of his first 100 days.
​



Some DJI history from JC;


  • An old-school indicator confirms the bull market.
  • I love a bigger Dow.
  • "Here comes the sun," and stocks are on the rise too.
Today most of financial media is hype-driven headlines and attention-span-destroying horsesh*t.

That's why, these days, everybody ignores the finer things, including this old-school indicator.

They treat it like it's the Tito Jackson of stock market indexes.

Or the fifth Beatle. Nobody cares about it.

But I do. It's more like George Harrison to me.

I think there's a lot of value in the modern version of a 140-year-old theory.

And, like its related indexes, this one is saying "here comes the sun" and stocks are on the rise too...

WTF Is the DJC?​


Polarity is in play with the Dow Jones Composite Average (DJC):



The red arrow points to prior-cycle highs. The green arrows point to where those prior-cycle highs provided support during drawdowns.

Why do I care about the Dow Jones Composite Average? And why should you care about it?

After all, it only exists because of the indexes that preceded it.

You know the old saying, "We stand on the shoulders of giants?" That's the DJC.

Let me take you back in time...

According to the Library of Congress, the legendary Charles Dow first published the Railroad Index in the Customer's Afternoon Letter in 1884.

The letter was a daily financial news bulletin and a precursor to The Wall Street Journal.

The Railroad Index included 11 stocks, highlighted by the New York Central and Union Pacific railroads.

It wasn't even a "Dow Jones" index yet. That came later.

Meanwhile, the first calculation of what we know as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) counted 12 different companies – including General Electric – in May 1896.

Charlie Dow selected the original components because they reflected the major areas of the U.S. economy following a major recession in the late 1800s.

He wanted to provide a quick and easy look at the U.S. economy.

The roster included names such as American Tobacco... American Sugar... Tennessee Coal & Iron... Chicago Gas Company... and U.S. Rubber Company...
Those are a few of the OG Dow components.

The average started at 40.94 points. On Monday, it closed at 40,227.59.

The DJIA expanded to 20 stocks in 1916 and, finally, to 30 stocks in 1928.

In 1929 Dow Jones created the "Big 3," introducing the Dow Jones Utility Average (DJU).

(That's well before LeBron James took his talents to South Beach to join Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade...)

The index managers formally removed any utilities stocks that were originally included in Dow's Industrial Average.

There are 15 stocks included in the DJU to this day.

And, in 1970, the Railroad Index officially became the Dow Jones Transportation Average (DJT).

Now let's get back to 2025...

Why 65 Is a Magic Number​


The Dow Jones Composite Average combines them all – it's made up of 65 stocks.

It includes all 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 20 from the Dow Jones Transportation Average, and 15 from the Dow Jones Utility Average.

And it doesn't get the attention that it deserves.

It wasn't part of Charles Dow's original tenets from the 1800s. So that pushes away the old school guys – like me, in some ways.

And the kids these days, the younger generation, simply lack the attention span to absorb Charlie Dow's tenets. So they have no context for current price action.

That's to say nothing of the fact that anything with the word "utility" in it is going to repel the folks who are only in it for the Nasdaq-100 and its tech-heavy composition.

But when you combine these 65 stocks into a price-weighted index, you get a heck of a look at the U.S. economy.

At the end of the day, that's all Charlie was trying to do.

He was a journalist, after all, not a trader.

So let's give credit where credit is due.

The Dow Jones Composite Average is a collection of data and analysis tools that date back 140 years.

I'm proud to say I use it every day.

Today, it says we should be buying stocks.

Are you with me?




Any Trump administration win on tax policy looks set to be overshadowed by the White House's tumultuous trade agenda.
Why it matters: Economic optimism across corporate America soared on hopes of tax cuts and deregulation, which some CEOs were sure would make up for any potential tariff pain.
  • Those expectations now look far too sunny.
Driving the news: President Trump's top economic officials are racing to pass legislation that includes an extension of 2017 tax cuts by July 4.
  • "The tax bill is moving forward," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at a White House briefing this morning. "It will give American business certainty; it will give the American people certainty."
The intrigue: That deadline — if met, which is no guarantee — would come just four days before the 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs is set to expire.
  • Bessent hinted that the administration might be close to trade deals with India and South Korea. But he would not clarify the status of talks with China, America's largest trading partner — talks that Chinese officials deny are underway.
State of play: Major tax legislation is Congressional Republicans' central goal for the year.
  • There remains plenty of uncertainty about how they will tweak taxes on individuals and what spending cuts the bill may include. However, the outlook for corporate taxes has gelled in the last few months in ways that business interests see as pro-growth.
  • There is no talk about raising the corporate income tax rate to pay for other priorities, for example, and it looks like the legislation will allow "bonus depreciation" and the ability to immediately deduct research and development expenses, both of which incentivize investment.
  • The outlook is a little murkier regarding whether the legislation may cap the corporate state and local tax deduction, something conservatives don't want to see.
What to watch: Bessent often likens Trump's economic agenda to a three-legged stool supported by deregulation, trade and tax cuts. The extent to which those policies are interlinked, however, remains unknown.
  • Over the weekend, Trump claimed tariff revenue would help offset tax cuts for individuals. This suggests substantial levies on imports would need to remain in place, downplaying the possibility of tariff reductions from the trade deals the administration itself has touted.
Speaking to reporters, Bessent said the administration would aim for high tariff revenues to support tax cuts and trade deals, though it's unclear what that would look like in practice.
  • "The president campaigned on no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, and restoring interest deductibility for American-made autos — so tariff income could be used for tax relief on all those immediately," Bessent said.
The bottom line: The White House is counting on tax cuts to buoy economic growth. Even leaving aside the political realities of tax reduction promises, ongoing tariff uncertainty could keep a dark cloud over the economy.


The only charts that really matter:




Everything is calm atm. Liquidity has been added.

The takeaway is however that Bond market disfunction is occurring lower and more quickly currently than it was 6mths ago. That is not a great sign for the bulls.

I'm guessing that liquidity came from the Fed. The Treasury TGA shows nothing recent that could account for added liquidity over the last 10days or so. The last big spend was at the end of March.


jog on
duc
 

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