That's when the (white haired now?-I don't see him much) buffoon held up his silly, super-sized
"Reciprocal Tariffs" (sic) plaque.
(Aside: You gotta wonder if he's gonna sleep with it tonight. He clearly had a Marty Schottenheimer sorta
"gleam in his eye" while clutching and admiring it.)
Anyways, following a market day that saw NASDAQ surprisingly UP ~1%, NASDAQ futures were shockingly UP ~2% after hours.
Until ~4:26 PM EDT.
ENTER the plaque.
How do you say, oh, yeah, PLUNGE!
Almost immediately they were DOWN ~3%, now sitting at DOWN ~2.3%.
Schwab's Sonders had some VERY interesting comments on CNBC about market pricing and where we go from here immediately before the dog & pony, er, buffoon and plaque show. Loosely paraphrasing, recession has NOT been priced in and we won't know much until CEO's speak in earnings season.
EDIT: NASDAQ futures now DOWN ~4.25%. We executed wide scale stock selling on Monday as discussed on a current Lib Day thread so there's that at least. It appears There Will Be Blood but sadly IMO not a buying opportunity.
Comments
No kidding that a recession is not priced in! Tech and consumer cyclicals are down YTD, and TSLA is the biggest dog of 2025. But many sectors have been doing just fine.
BRK is near 52 week highs, Visa is only 5% off the highs. Many defensive sectors are up YTD - Energy, Basic Materials, Utilities, Consumer Def, Financial, Real Estate, Healthcare.
Indeed, the best is yet to come.
My fave and my thoughts exactly:
Excerpt:
“They’ve come up with the most extreme numbers that we can’t even comprehend. How they’re coming up with these?
President Donald Trump’s tariff plans have been delivering plenty of shock and awe across global markets. Closer to home, futures are pointing to a 1,200-point-plus plunge for the Dow industrials DJIA and potentially the worst day since 2022 for the S&P 500 SPX.
But that’s a tall order against the backdrop of what some have calculated are the biggest tariffs in 100 years. Apart from how China and other countries will react, the threat of inflation and recession for U.S. investors is at the heart of the angst for markets.
Our call of the day comes from Charles Schwab’s chief investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders, who offers up a post-tariff-turmoil playbook for rattled investors.
The extreme market reaction so far is “justified because there are still a lot of open-ended questions” surrounding, for example, potential hefty tariff hikes on China and Vietnam, Sonders told Bloomberg TV late Wednesday.
“I think what we’re likely to see fairly soon is maybe a rerating of the probabilities of recession,” she said. And given some of that has been happening in the last couple of weeks — Goldman hiked its recession view earlier this week — there may be more on that front, she said.
Investors also need to consider chances of an earnings recession, as companies struggle to pass on higher input costs, said Sonders. “I think at the very least we are going to see continued downward pressure on 2025 estimates.”
“We’re already in week 15, in terms of consecutive weeks where earnings estimates have been coming down. Given that just a few months ago, when we had expectations of about 14% or 15% earnings growth in 2025 that was predicated on record-breaking profit margins, there’s no way we’re going to maintain record-breaking profit margins.”
Currently standing at around 10%, consensus on 2025 earnings growth, is “too lofty,” with the path of least resistance “significantly down from here,” she cautioned.
Still, with earnings season around the corner, markets will begin to get an inkling of how companies indirectly or directly impacted by tariffs, plan to manage those, whether by passing to consumers or absorbing into profit margins, said Sonders.
So what to buy in this landscape? “What we’ve been suggesting to investors in this backdrop is to be more factor focused, trying to navigate around sector leadership, which has been all over the map,” she said.
Sonders said what’s been an anchor for investors during a tough run for stocks has been sticking to stable companies with high profit margins. So she prefers high-quality stocks, while Schwab has also been encouraging clients to seek non-U.S. diversification plays.
“And I think a year like this so far is a reminder that international equity diversification pays rewards, and it can sometimes happen really, really quickly in the face of what had been a lot of skepticism about ‘Why would I have any money anywhere else other than the United States.'”
While Sonders didn’t manage specific investments, the iShares Edge MSCI USA Quality Factor ETF QUAL has slipped 3% this year, while the Vanguard Total International Stock ETF VXUS has gained 6%
When the buffoon was designing his tariffs plaque (that I am reasonably certain he slept with last night), did his cronies just put a bowl in front of him with little folded pieces of paper with %'s on them?
Then somebody called out each country's name, and the buffoon reached in the bowl to select a piece of paper for each, and Voila?
Surely there was THAT much thought put into it, right?
Snip:
"...The islands, which are uninhabited, can be reached only by sea, and typically require a two week sail from Australia to visit..."
CNBC's Steve Liesman said nobody that knows anything about tariffs/tariff history, including him, has ever heard of said formula.
Like I said above, I'm pretty sure the tariff %'s were written on little pieces of paper, and then the buffoon pulled them out individually when the respective countries names were called for the plaque.
So IMHO there WAS some thought put into it. Just maybe not quite enough, eh?
"I resemble that remark!"
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/03/trump-tariffs-live-updates-stock-market-trade-war.html
BOLD added
The formula used by the White House to determine its sweeping tariff policy looks like it could have come from artificial intelligence chatbots. That’s according to a story from The Verge on Thursday, which used some quick work done by journalist James Surowiecki and some commenters on X.
Surowiecki wrote on X that it appears as if the Trump administration “just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.” The Verge said that its reporters were able to at least partially receive the same figures by asking popular AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok, for “easy” ways to solve trade deficits or to put the U.S. on an “even playing field” with other countries.
The four bots reportedly gave “the same fundamental suggestion,” though some of the details provided by each one differed.
See also the imbedded prior article at
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/03/how-did-the-us-arrive-at-its-tariff-figures-.html
Next guest, Richard Fisher, former Dallas Fed Chair, attested to Steve's analysis, stating that he knows the Vietnam tariff % is wrong because "(He) negotiated it!"
So then, it does appears that the buffoon DID in fact draw other country's tariff %'s out of a bowl.
At this unbelievably low point in US history, that's my story and I'm sticking to it until proven otherwise.