Tariff Confusion, Inflation, Industrial Production, and Continuing Financial Market Volatility April 10, 2025 President Trump’s peek-a-boo tariff policy is putting Lincoln’s warning that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time to a test. Investors got severely whiplashed yesterday afternoon by the 90-day tariff pause. The subsequent sharp rally in U.S. equities…
American Vertigo April 9, 2025 Who as a child didn’t discover the joy of spinning round & round and the ensuing sensation of dizziness? Floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee, President Trump’s style is full of razzle-dazzling action that forces consumers, investors, business planners, news reporters, and other world leaders into a…
The digital dollar is no longer a distant idea—it’s a very real financial development. As the United States tests its own version of a central bank digital currency, traders across the globe are preparing for what this means. The digital dollar could transform how currencies are traded, how money moves internationally, and how central banks…
Central Bank Rate Cuts in India and News Zealand April 9, 2025 Central bank officials in India and New Zealand, in widely expected moves, cut their key interest rates by 25 basis points today. The Reserve Bank of India‘s unanimously decided repo rate reduction to 6.0% followed a similar cut made at the prior February…
Back to Panic Mode as U.S. Reciprocal Tariffs Take Effect and China Strikes Back April 9, 2025 The U.S. tariff on China is now 104%, and China’s government has answered with an 84% levy on imports of U.S. goods. An editorial in yesterday’s NYT by University of Chicago economics professor Brent Neiman, whose collaborated work…
Whether Today’s Market Rise Endures Or Represents Just A Dead-Cat Bounce Remains To Be Seen April 8, 2025 As of noon GMT (08:00 EDT), U.S. stock futures had recouped 2.9% in the Russell 2000, 2.7% in the case of the DOW, 2.3% for the S&P 500 and 2.2% in the Nasdaq. In either case, bottom-fishing…
Little Respite for Worried Investors April 7, 2025 The heavy selloff of riskier assets extended dynamically into a fresh week. President Trump has shown no inclination of blinking first on his broadly based and very large tariff hikes. Reactions by other countries have been mixed. The ten-year U.S. Treasury yield eased another basis point and…
Markets Give U.S. Tariff Program Little Benefit of the Doubt April 5, 2025 It is customary when America gets a new president for financial markets to give the new leadership a honeymoon period. Call it benefit of the doubt. For example, when Donald Trump became president the first time on January 20, 2017, he introduced…
Next Week’s Menu: April 5-11, 2025 April 4, 2025 Central Banks: Interest rates will be reviewed in Israel, India, Serbia, Peru, Romania, New Zealand and the Philippines. Minutes from the last Federal Open Market Committee meeting will be published. Schnabel of the ECB, Goolsbee of the Fed, Breeden of the Bank of England and Bullock…
Intensifying Flight to Safety April 4, 2025 Normally the first Friday of every month is focused on the U.S. Labor Department release of the prior month’s jobs report but not this time. The radical program of reciprocal tariffs unveiled late Wednesday afternoon by President Trump continued to reverberate around world financial markets and government halls…