After listening to President Trump ramble on and outline the guts of his tariffs, I’m confused how I should play stocks. The market indices and share prices of big US stocks are on the slide but out SPI futures tell us that our market will open up 41 points higher at the start.
What do these early reaction signs mean? Here’s my best guess — the Trump tariffs aren’t as bad as they could have been for Australia. However, there is a second part to this Trump tariff tale and that will be the reaction of other countries to these US taxes on their exports.
Here are some of the big points President Trump led with in his speech from the Rose Garden in the White House:
- Trump told us: “They do it to us, so we will do it to them.”
- 100,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in Biden’s term last year.
- “It’s our turn to prosper to reduce taxes and reduce our debt.’
- “Factories will come into the USA…it will be a Golden Age of America.”
- Non-monetary protection barriers of trading partners have been considered.
- There will be a 25% on all overseas cars sold in the USA.
- Canada dairy farmers have been overprotected.
- Australians are lovely people “… but Australia bans US beef! We’re doing the same thing tonight!”
- There’s a minimum baseline tariff of 10% on all countries exports into the USA.
- We weren’t signalled out, so it looks like we’ll cop a 10% tariff on our exports.
- Switzerland will have a 31% tariff.
- Vietnam 46%; Cambodia 49%; South Africa 30%; Indonesia 32%; India 20%; 25% South Korea; Taiwan 32%.
- The EU will see a 20% tariff, China 34% and the UK 10%.
As the President spoke, this was what after-hours market indicators were telling us:
- SPDR Dow ETF down 0.91%.
- SPDR S&P 500 down 2.18%.
- Apple was off 4.72%.
- Nvidia slid 3.47%.
- Oracle lost 2.86%.
This suggests the US market will find it hard to rise tomorrow and we’re bound to await the reactions of other countries. These aren’t likely to produce good headlines for stocks.
That said, President Trump has labelled his trade slugs as “kind reciprocal” because he has only hit his trading partners with tariffs that are only half of what they have imposed on US producers.
It’s possible the market has been expecting more aggressive tariffs, but I don’t think we’ll really know if this is the case until we see how Wall Street behaves tomorrow.
Undoubtedly, market smarties will be looking at individual companies and how they’ll be negatively or positively affected by these tariffs, which will lead to buying and selling accordingly.
From our point of view, if 10% is our slug, that’s not huge. I’m sure our beef producers will find other buyers who’ll be happy to reduce their trade with Donald Trump’s America, which is allegedly on the ‘Golden Age’ comeback trail.
To keep Americans happy, the President said these tariff collections will bankroll big tax cuts and Wall Street will like the sound of that.
The only big question mark for me will be how aggressive the tariff responses of those countries that have been hit harder than 10% will be.
PS: Remember Donald Trump is a deal maker and there is an expectation that many of the countries slugged by these tariffs could do a deal to reduce their tariffs. Their reward would be lower US tariffs and this would be good for stocks over the course of this year.
